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SOUTH AMERICA 



OBSERVATIONS AND IMPRESSIONS 



BY 

JAMES BRYCE 

AUTHOR OF "THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE' 
" THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH," ETC. 



WITH MAPS 



NEW EDITION CORRECTED AND REVISED 



NtfU fgttk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1917 

All rights reserved 






Copybioht, 1912, 1914, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1912. Reprinted 
October, November, December, 1912 ; January, 1913. 

New revised edition, February, July, 1914; March, 
December, 1916; October, 1917. 

TRANSFERRED FSOM 

BEAOING R( 
JUN 24 «?| 



Q#/t|^ 



Norbjooo $rt08 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick <fc Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO MY FKIENDS OF THE 
ENGLISH ALPINE CLUB 



PREFACE 

This book records observations made and impres- 
sions formed during a journey through western and 
southern South America from Panama to Argentina 
and Brazil via the Straits of Magellan. The nature 
of its contents is briefly outlined in the Introduction 
which follows, so all that I have to do here is to acknowl- 
edge gratefully the many kindnesses I received in 
every part of South America which I visited, and in 
particular from the following persons : Colonel Goethals, 
Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal, and other officers 
of the United States engineers stationed there, and 
Colonel Gorgas, head of the medical staff ; the officials 
of the Peruvian Corporation in Lima and of the Peru- 
vian Southern Railways in Mollendo, Arequipa, and La 
Paz ; the officials of the Antofagasta and Bolivia Rail- 
road Company; those of the Transandine Railway 
Company in Chile and those of the Buenos .Aires and 
Pacific and Argentine Great Western Railways Com- 
panies in Mendoza and Buenos Aires, and also those of 
the Leopoldina Railway in Brazil. Nor must I fail to 
express my obligations to the heads in New York of 
the firm of Messrs. W. R. Grace Co., who advised 
me regarding my journey, and to my friend Professor 
Bingham of Yale University, who, familiar with South 



viii PREFACE 

America from his own travels and studies, has given me 
valuable help in many ways. 

I have also to return my respectful thanks to the 
Governments of Chile and Brazil, who were good enough 
to extend to me facilities for travel on their railways, 
and to the Governments of Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, 
and Uruguay for other courtesies. To many states- 
men and scholars in these six republics, too numerous 
to mention by name, as also to not a few of my own 
fellow-countrymen from Britain and Canada who are 
there settled, I am indebted for hospitality, for private 
acts of kindness, and for valuable information. 

JAMES BRYCE. 
Junb 27, 1912. 



NOTE TO REVISED EDITION 

This edition has been carefully revised and many 
corrections have been made in it. 

February 26th, 1913. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface vii 

Introduction .......... xvii 

CHAPTER I 
THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 

The Part of the Isthmus and the Strait in History ... 1 
The Isthmus of Suez and the Isthmus of Panama : The Route 

from Colon to Culebra and Panama . . . . . 2 

View from the Hill of Ancon 9 

The Natives of the Isthmus : The San Bias Indians ... 13 
The English Raiders : Drake and Morgan . . . . .15 

The Canal : Gatun Locks and Lake ...... 19 

The Great Cutting at Culebra 24 

Administration and Sanitation of the Canal Zone ... 26 

Failure of the French Undertaking due Primarily to Disease . 28 

Commercial Prospects of the Canal 33 

General Impressions made by the Isthmus and the Canal . . 35 

CHAPTER II 
THE COAST OF PERU 

Cold Climate of the West Coast 37 

The Antarctic Current • . . 38 

Aridity and Barrenness of the Peruvian Coast .... 39 

Payta : The Guano Islands . • 40 

Lima : General Aspect and Buildings 46 

Life and Society in Lima 51 

Mollendo and the Peruvian Southern Railway .... 54 

First View of the Andes 56 

The Desert of Western Peru 57 

The City of Arequipa 60 

ix 



x TABLE OF CONTENTS 

TAB* 

The Volcano of El Misti 61 

Oriental Aspect of Arequipa 64 

Character of the People of Arequipa 66 

A Story from Colonial Days 69 

CHAPTER in 
CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

Physical Character of Peru 75 

Crossing of the Andes from Arequipa to the Central Plateau of 

Lake Titicaca 80 

Scenery of the Valley from the Plateau to Cuzco ... 81 

One of the Sources of the Amazon 86 

Market Day at Sicuani : The Quichua Indians .... 88 

Cuzco : Its Situation and Aspect 95 

The Spanish Buildings at Cuzco 96 

The Ancient Buildings : Inca Walls 102 

The Prehistoric Fortress of Sacsahuaman 107 

Impression made by the Remains of Ancient Peruvian Work . 114 

Historical Associations of Cuzco 114 

[Note on the Fortress Walls of Sacsahuaman] .... 118 

CHAPTER IV 
LAKE TITICACA AND THE CENTRAL ANDES 

The Central Plateau and the Lake 119 

Inhabitants of the Plateau : The Aymara Indians . . . 121 

Scenery of Lake Titicaca 124 

The Shrine of Copacavana 128 

Voyage to the Sacred Islands 130 

Koati : The Island of the Moon 131 

The Island of the Sun 132 

The Bath and Garden of the Inca 133 

The Sacred Rock of the Wild Cat 135 

View of the Snowy Range of Sorata or Illampu . . • 141 

The Lake of Vinamarca 143 

Tiahuanaco and its Ruins 144 

Impression made by the Ruins 147 

Character of the Ancient Peruvian Civilization .... 152 

The Primitive Religion of Peru 156 

Government and the Policy of the Incas • • 160 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xi 

CHAPTER V 
LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 



PAGE 



Origin of the Bolivian Republic 166 

General Physical Character of Bolivia . . . . 167 

Approach to La Paz : The Barranca 168 

Climate of La Paz : The Mountain Sickness or Soroche . . 171 

The City and its Environs . . . . . . . . 174 

Character and Habits of the Bolivian Indians .... 179 

The Plateau from La Paz to Oruro 186 

Uyuni : The Great Bolivian Desert 191 

Passage through the Andes 198 

The Borax Lake and the Volcanoes 199 

View of the Western Cordillera 203 

The Desert of Atacama . . . . . • . . 204 

CHAPTER VI 
CHILE 

The Three Regions of Chile 206 

Northern Chile : The Nitrate Fields 207 

Megillones and Antofagasta ....... 210 

Valparaiso 212 

Santiago 216 

Pedro de Valdivia and the Rock of Santa Lucia .... 218 

Chilean Society and Politics . . . . . • . . 220 

Southern Chile : Its Climate and Scenery 223 

The Coast Cities : Concepcion and Talcahuano .... 225 

Lota Valdivia and Corral 227 

The Araucanian Indians : Their History, Customs, and Religion 232 

Osorno and its German Colony 239 

Rio Bueno 242 

Attractiveness of Southern Chile 241 

Lake Rinihue and the Chilean Forests 244 

CHAPTER VII 
ACROSS THE ANDES 

The Andean Range 248 

The Uspallata Pass from Chile into Argentina .... 250 

Construction of the Transandine Railway 251 



xii TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PASB 

Scenery on the Chilean Side 253 

The Tunnel under the Summit of the Cordillera . . . 256 

Scenery on the Argentine Side 256 

Aconcagua and Tupungato 257 

The City of Mendoza 260 

Argentines and Chileans 264 

Return across the Mountains and Ascent to the Cumbre . . 267 

The Christ of the Andes 269 

Observations on the Scenery of the Andes in General . . 271 

Comparison with the Himalayas 276 

[Note on the Passage of the Andes, in 1817, by the Army of 

General San Martin] 280 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 

Discovery of the Straits, and Circumnavigation of the Globe, by 

Magellan 284 

Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 286 

The Coast of Southern Chile : The Sea-birds . . . .286 

Approach to, and Entrance of, the Straits 290 

The Scenery of the Western Half of the Straits .... 291 

Punta Arenas and Tierra del Fuego 300 

The Eastern Half of the Straits 304 

General Observations on the Character of the Straits . . 305 

Their Historical Importance 307 

The Falkland Isles, their Character and Products . . . 308 

Their History 311 

Their Scenery 313 

CHAPTER IX 
ARGENTINA 



The Approach to Buenos Aires . 

Aspect of the City .... 

Society in Buenos Aires 

Physical Character of Argentina . . 

Inhabitants of Argentina : The Gaucho 

Agriculture and Ranching . 

The Process of Settlement : Labour 



315 

316 
318 
324 
327 
329 
330 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii 

PAGE 

The Scenery of the Pampas 334 

Economic Prospects of Argentina 336 

The European Immigrants . . 338 

Character and Tendencies of Society in Argentina . . . 341 

Argentina the Most Modern of South American Countries . 34.6 



CHAPTER X 
URUGUAY 

How Uruguay became an Independent Republic . . . 349 

Resources of the Country 350 

The City of Montevideo 351 

Population of Uruguay : Immigrants and Natives . . . 355 

A Revolution in Uruguay 356 

The Whites and the Reds 357 

Causes of the Revolutionary Habit 358 

Prosperity of Uruguay 362 

CHAPTER XI 
BRAZIL 

How Brazil fell to the Portuguese 366 

Physical Features of the Different Parts of the Country . . 368 

Voyage from Montevideo to Santos 370 

Santos and the Railway to Sao Paulo 372 

The City of Sao Paulo and its People 374 

Approach to Rio de Janeiro 377 

Aspect of Rio : The Bay and the Mountains .... 378 

Scenery of the Environs of Rio 382 

Petropolis the « Hill Station " of Rio 384 

Excursion through the Mountains 386 

A Brazilian Forest 390 

Naval Mutiny at Rio 395 

Economic Resources of Brazil ....... 402 

The People : German and Italian Immigrants .... 405 

> The Negroes and Indians 407 

Recent History of Brazil 410 

Character and Tendencies of the Brazilians .... 416 

The Future of Brazil 420 



xiv TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER XII 
THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 

PAOB 

The Colonial Empire of Spain divided into Sixteen Republics 

or Nations 423 

What is a Nation? 424 

Process by which New Nations Arise 426 

The Administrative Divisions of the Colonies the Basis of the 

Division into Republics 427 

Influences which differentiate Nations 429 

Geographical Position 429 

Physical Environment : Climate 430 

The Aborigines : Their Number and Character .... 432 

The Struggle for Independence and the Civil Wars . . . 434 

Recent Economic Development : Immigration .... 437 

Which of the Republics have become Nations ? . . . . 438 

Chile and Argentina : Mexico, Peru, Brazil .... 441 

The Caribbean and Central American Republics . . . 441 
Does there exist a Common Sentiment of Spanish-American 

Nationality? 444 

Will the Present Political Divisions be Maintained ? . . . 447 

Prospects of International Peace in South America . . . 448 

CHAPTER XIII 
THE RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 



Importance of the Aboriginal Element in Spanish 



American 



454 
455 
458 
460 
460 



Countries 

How the Native Tribes came to Survive 

Probable Present Numbers of the Indian Population 

The Indians in Peru and Bolivia .... 

Present State of these Indians, Social and Religious 

Ulloa's Report on their Condition in the Eighteenth Century . 463 

Universal Illiteracy of the Indians : Their Civil and Political 

Status 465 

Relations of Indians and Whites : No " Colour Line " in Latin 

America 470 

How the Presence of the Aborigines has affected the Whites . 475 

vThe Negroes in Brazil 479 

-Three General Conclusions regarding the Native Indians of South 

America 480 



» 



TABLE OF CONTENTS xv 

PAGE 

It is not certain that they have injured the White Race by In- 
termixture 481 

Demoralization of the Peruvian Indians by the Spanish Con- 
quest, and Subsequent Oppression . . . . 481 

Racial Repugnance not a Universal Phenomenon in the Rela- 
tions of Peoples of Different Colour ..... 482 

CHAPTER XIV 

THE TWO AMERICAS AND THE RELATION OP SOUTH 
AMERICA TO EUROPE 

Origin of the Name " America " 484 

How it came to be applied to Two Continents .... 486 

Some Physical Similarities of the Two Continents . . . 488 

Some Similarities in their History 489 

" Teutonic " America and " Latin " America .... 490 

Divergent History of the Two Americas 492 

The Indians : The Mines : The Settlers 493 

Different Methods of Government . . . . ' . . 494 

The Two Wars of Independence 496 

The English Colonies held together while the Spanish split Up 499 

What " Teutonic " and Latin America have in Common . . 500 

The Contrasts between them are More Important . . . 504 

Present Attitude of Spanish Americans to North Americans . 507 
Real Affinities of Spanish America are with Some European 

Peoples . . . . ' 512 

Sympathy and Intercourse with Spain not very Close . . 513 

Relations are Most Intimate with France ..... 518 
Are the South American Peoples a New Group, with a New 

"Racial Type"? 520 

CHAPTER XV 

THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL LIFE IN SPANISH- 
AMERICAN REPUBLICS 

European Views of Spanish America during and after the War 

of Independence 524 

Physical or Geographical Conditions affecting the Political Life 527 

Racial Conditions : The Aborigines 528 

Economic and Social Conditions 532 

Historical Conditions in the. Colonial Period .... 534 



xvi TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAOB 

Historical Conditions during and since the War of Independence 536 
The Peoples of the Republics began with no Experience in the 

Methods of Free Government 537 

Some Revolutionary Leaders did not approve Democracy . . 538 

Would Monarchy or Oligarchy have been Better? . . . 540 
Differences between the existing Republics: Three Classes of 

States 541 

Some have truly Republican Governments . . . ^ . . 543 

Influences making for Political Progress 546 

European Judgments on Spanish-American Republic unduly 

Severe . 550 

i 
CHAPTER XVI 

SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 

Rapid filling up of the Cultivable Areas of the World . . 552 

Regions available for Settlement in South America . . . 555 

The Temperate Regions 556 

The Selvas of the Amazonian Plain 558 

Possible Future Population of South America .... 563 

Elements, Aboriginal and White, in the Population . . . 564 

Phenomena of Race Intermixture in South America , . . 566 

No Predominant Type in the South American Peoples . . 568 
Spanish Americans misjudged because their Conditions at Time 

of Independence were not Understood 570 

Evidences of Social and Political Advancement .... 573 
South America has suffered from Want of Intellectual Contact 

with Other Countries 574 

The Spanish Race stronger on the Practical than on the Intel- 
lectually Creative Side 577 

Backwardness of Knowledge and Intelligence in the Rural Parts 

of Spanish America 580 

Decline in the Influence of the Church and Religion . . . 582 

Continued Vigour of the Spanish -American Race . . . 584 

Note I. Some Books upon Latin America .... 587 

Note II. A Few Remarks on travelling in South America . 588 

Index 591 

Maps. South America. 

The Isthmus of Panama. 

Parts of Peru and Bolivia. 

The Straits of Magellan. 

Parts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. 



INTRODUCTION 

Whoever read as a boy the books of old travellers 
in the Andes, such as Humboldt's Aspects of Nature, 
or pored over such accounts of the primitive American 
peoples as are given in Prescott's Conquest of Peru must 
have longed to visit some day the countries that fired 
his imagination. These had been my experiences, and 
to them there was subsequently added a curiosity to 
learn the causes which produced so many revolutions 
and civil wars in Spanish America, and, still later, a 
sense that these countries, some of them issuing from 
a long period of turbulence, were becoming potent 
economic factors in the modern world. So when after 
many years the opportunity of having four clear 
months for a journey to South America presented 
itself, I spent those months in seeing as much as I 
could within the time, and was able to make some 
observations and form certain impressions regarding 
the seven republics I visited. These observations and 
impressions are contained in the following pages. They 
are, of course, merely first impressions, but the impres- 
sions which travel makes on a fresh mind have their 
value if they are tested by subsequent study and by 
being submitted to persons who know the country 
thoroughly. I have tried so to test these impressions 
of mine, and hope they may be of service to those who 
desire to learn something about South America, but 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

have not time to peruse the many books of travel that 
have been written about each of its countries. 

The chief points of interest which these countries 
have for Europeans and North Americans may be 
summed up as follows : — 

1. The aspects of nature. 

2. The inhabitants, the white part of whom are of 
Spanish origin, except the Brazilians, who come from 
Portugal. 

3. The economic resources of the several countries. 

4. The prospects for the development of industry and 
commerce. 

5. The relics of prehistoric civilization. 

6. The native Indian population. 

7. The conditions of political life in the several re- 
publics. 

It may be convenient that I should explain how far 
and in what order each of these topics is dealt with. 

The first eleven chapters of the book contain a de- 
scription of what I saw of scenery and of social and 
economic phenomena in the seven republics of Panama, 
Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, 
and in these chapters the first three of the above-men- 
tioned subjects are dealt with when and as each country 
is described. It is Nature that chiefly engages the 
traveller's mind in Peru and Bolivia, as it is economic 
development which interests him in Argentina and 
Uruguay. In Chile and Brazil he must be always 
thinking of both. The fourth topic has been treated so 
fully by many writers who have brought special knowl- 



INTRODUCTION xix 

edge to it and have written professedly for the informa- 
tion of business men, that I have not thought it neces- 
sary to fill this book with statistical tables or, indeed, 
to do more than indicate the possibilities for commercial 
development or agricultural immigration which the 
natural resources of each country seem to promise. 

It is only in Peru and Bolivia that any prehistoric 
monuments exist. Some of the most important and 
interesting of these I saw, and in describing them I have 
endeavoured to convey an idea of the character of the 
ancient Peruvian civilization (if that name can properly 
be applied to it) and of the people who produced it. 
This is done in Chapters III, IV, and V. 

Only in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile did I have opportu- 
nities of seeing the native Indians. In the two former 
states they constitute a part of the total population far 
larger than in any other state (except Paraguay) : they 
are nominally Christians, and they lead a settled agricul- 
tural life. In Chile there is only one considerable Indian 
tribe remaining, the famous Araucanians. Of these 
warriors, of the Quichuas in Peru and of the Aymaras in 
Bolivia, some account will be found in Chapters III to VI. 

In the above-mentioned eleven descriptive chapters I 
have endeavoured to individualize, so to speak, the chief 
countries of South America, so as to bring out the chief 
characteristics, natural and human, of each of them. 

But marked as are the differences between the various 
republics, they have all something in common, some- 
thing that belongs to South America as opposed to 
Europe or North America or Australia. There are 



xx INTRODUCTION 

also certain general questions affecting the whole 
Continent which present themselves to the traveller's 
mind and need to be discussed upon broad and gen- 
eral lines. To these questions the last five chapters of 
the book have been devoted. One chapter endeavours 
to indicate the causes which have divided the vast 
Spanish-American dominion (including Mexico and 
Central America) as it stood in a.d. 1810 into the six- 
teen independent republics of to-day, some of which 
have become, others of which are becoming, true nations 
with marked national characteristics. Another chapter 
deals with the relations to the white population of the 
aborigines in the Spanish countries and of the negroes 
in Brazil, the only state in which negroes are numerous. 
It is a subject of study all the more interesting because 
these relations are altogether different from those borne 
by the European element to the coloured races in the 
British colonies, in India, and in the United States of 
North America, and also because the intermixture of 
races which is now going on in South America suggests 
physiological and ethnological problems of high interest. 
A third chapter (Chapter XIV) briefly compares the 
conditions of settlement and of government which de- 
termined the course of economic and political develop- 
ment in North and in South America respectively and en- 
quires how far the latter Continent is to be considered any 
more closely related to the former than it is to Europe. 
Is there, in fact, such a thing as that which the word Pan- 
Americanism is intended to describe, or does the expres- 
sion denote an aspiration rather than a fact ? 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

Of the political history of these republics very little 
is said in this book, and of their current politics nothing 
at all. That is a topic on which it would not be 
fitting for me to enter. But in travelling through the 
seven countries, in observing their physical features and 
the character of their people, and the state of knowl- 
edge and education among them, as well as in reading 
accounts of the kind of administration which the Spanish 
Crown gave them during nearly three centuries, I 
was struck by the influence which all these facts must 
have had upon the free governments which the Revolu- 
tionary leaders tried to set up when they broke away 
from the mother country. The history of Spanish 
America since 1810 cannot be understood or fairly 
judged, without taking these things into account. 
They have been the fundamental and determinative 
conditions of political life in these countries; and to 
them Chapter XV has been devoted. 

In the last Chapter (XVI) I have touched upon 
several subjects relating to the South American lands 
and peoples in general for which no appropriate earlier 
place could be found, and have indulged in a few con- 
jectures as to the future both of the several states and 
of the Continent as a whole. These are not meant as 
predictions, but rather as suggestions of possibilities 
which may serve to set others thinking. 

Lest some of the views presented, especially those re- 
garding the native races and political conditions should 
be deemed unduly optimistic, let me try to meet any 
such criticism by a few words on optimism in general. 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

Pessimism is easier than optimism, as it is easier to 
destroy than to construct. There was an old dictum 
in the Middle Ages, "Omnia tendunt naturaliter in non 
esse," 1 and Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust tells us 

that 

Alles was entsteht 
1st werth dass es zu Grunde geht. 2 

If pessimism is easy, the more need to stand on guard 
against it. 

The duty of a traveller, or a historian, or a philoso- 
pher is, of course, to reach and convey the exact truth, 
and any tendency either to lighten or to darken 
the picture is equally to be condemned. But where 
there is room for doubt, and wherever that which 
may be called the "temperamental equation" of the 
observer comes in, an optimistic attitude would seem 
to be the safer, that is to say, likely to be nearer 
to the truth. We are all prone to see faults rather 
than merits, and in making this remark I do not 
forget the so-called " log-rolling critics," because with 
them the question is of what the critic says, not of what 
he sees, which may be something quite different. If 
this maxim holds true, it is especially needed when a 
traveller is judging a foreign country, for the bias always 
present in us which favours our own national ways and 
traits makes us judge the faults of other nations more 
severely than we do those with which we are familiar. 
As this unconscious factor often tends to darken the 

1 All things tend naturally towards non-existence. So in the 
original statutes of Oriel College, Oxford (founded in a.d. 1327). 
1 All that comes into being deserves to perish. 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

picture that a traveller draws, it is safer for him, if in 
doubt, to throw in a little light so as to secure a just 
result. Moreover, we are disposed, when we deal with 
another country, to be unduly impressed by the defects 
we actually see and to forget to ask what is, after all, the 
really important question, whether things are getting 
better or worse. Is it an ebbing or a flowing tide that 
we see? Even in reflecting on the past of our own 
country, which we know better than we do that of other 
countries, we are apt, in noting the emergence of new 
dangers, to forget how many old dangers have dis- 
appeared. Much more is this kind of error likely to 
affect us in the case of a country whose faults repel us 
more than do our own national faults, and whose re- 
cuperative forces we may overlook or undervalue. 

Such considerations as these have made me believe 
that the natural propensity of a West European or 
North American traveller to judge Spanish Americans 
by his own standards needs to be corrected not only 
by making allowance for differences of intellect and 
character, but also by a comprehension of the history 
of these peoples and of the difficulties, many of them 
due to causes outside their own control, which have 
encompassed and entangled them ever since their an- 
cestors first set foot in the Western world. Whoever 
compares these difficulties as they stand to-day with 
those of a century ago will find grounds not only for 
more lenient judgments than most Europeans have 
passed, but also for brighter hopes. 

Neither in this matter, however, nor anywhere in 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

the chapters which deal with the social and political 
conditions of South America have I ventured to dog- 
matize. My aim has rather been to start questions and 
to indicate various sides from which South American 
problems may be approached. The interest of these 
new countries lies largely in the fact that while some 
problems already familiar to the Old World, have here 
taken on new aspects, others appear here almost for the 
first time in history. Some of them involve phenomena 
of race growth and race intermixture for the investiga- 
tion of which the data we possess are still insufficient. 
Others turn upon the still unascertained capacity of 
European races for working and thriving in tropical 
countries. It may take many years before science can 
tell us half of what we desire to know regarding the 
economic possibilities of the central regions of the 
Continent, for the development of which no labour is 
now available. The future of the temperate South is 
more certain, for all the material conditions that make 
for prosperity in North America and Australia are 
present there also. These countries will be the home 
of rich and populous nations, and possibly of great 
nations. The most interesting of all the questions 
which a journey in South America suggests are those 
which concern the growth of these young nations. 
What type of manhood will they develop ? What place 
in the world will they ultimately hold ? They need fear 
no attacks from the powers of the Northern Hemi- 
sphere, and they have abundant resources within. 
Their future is in their own hands. 



SOUTH AMERICA 



CHAPTER I 

THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 

South America is bounded at its northern end by 
an isthmus and at its southern by a strait. They are 
the two gateways by which the western side of the 
Continent, cut off from the western and central por- 
tions by a long and lofty mountain range, can be ap- 
proached from the Atlantic. It was by crossing the 
Isthmus that Vasco Nunez de Balboa discovered the 
South Sea. It was by penetrating the Strait that 
Magellan, seven years later, discovered that this South 
Sea was a vast ocean stretching all the way to the 
coasts of Asia. In old Spanish days all the commerce 
of the west coast passed over the Isthmus, 1 but when 
the days of steam navigation arrived, that commerce 
passed through Magellan's Strait. Now the Isthmus 
itself is to be turned into a strait and will be a channel 
for sea-borne trade, the main gateway to the West. 

An isthmus and a strait are, to the historical geo- 
grapher and to the geographical historian, the most in- 
teresting things with which geographical science has to 
deal. Commerce and travel and naval warfare con- 
centrate themselves at the spot where a narrow channel 
connects wide seas, and the strip of land which severs 
two seas from one another interposes a barrier to water- 
borne trade and turns it off into other directions. It 
1 The trade to the Philippines crossed the Continent at Tehuantepec, 

B 1 



2 SOUTH AMERICA 

becomes a point the control of which can stop the 
march of armies, and it furnishes a central stronghold 
whence ships can go forth to threaten the neighbouring 
coasts. Thus every strait and every isthmus has a high 
commercial importance, and almost always a political 
importance also, since lines of commerce have usually 
been, and are now more than ever, potent factors in 
human affairs, while the command of a water passage 
for fleets, or that of a land passage for armies, may 
be of capital importance in war. 

The Eastern Hemisphere has an isthmus which has 
been significant for world commerce and for world his- 
tory almost from the beginning of civilization. It is 
the Isthmus of Suez. So the Western Hemisphere has 
its isthmus of supreme importance, — that of Panama. 
It is a link between continents and a barrier between 
seas, which, though its history is far shorter than is 
that of Suez, yet has been at some moments in the 
last four centuries, and may be still more hereafter, 
of high significance for the movements of the world. 

There are some notable points of similarity between 
these two isthmuses. Their breadth is not very dif- 
ferent, — Suez sixty miles, Panama about fifty-four. 
The shortest line across each runs nearly due north 
and south. The continents which each unites are 
gigantic. Each lies in what is, or was till quite lately, 
a practically uninhabited country. 

Here, however, the likeness ends; and we come to 
points of contrast that are more remarkable. The 
Isthmus of Suez is flat as a table from one end to the 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 3 

other; that of Panama is covered with high and 
generally steep hills. Suez is an arid waste, where 
there is not a brook and scarcely even a well, and by 
consequence not a tree, nor. any growing thing save 
a few thin and thorny shrubs. Panama has a tre- 
mendous rainfall in places, varying from one hundred 
and forty inches a year on the north side to sixty on 
the south, and is covered with wood so dense that 
roads have to be not only hewn through the forest but 
defended by incessant cutting against the efforts of a 
prolific nature, always seeking to reassert her rights. 
Having a keen, dry, desert air, the whole Suez region 
is a healthy one, where man need fear disease only in 
those few spots which he has in recent years brought 
under irrigation. Panama had for centuries a climate 
so deadly that even passing travellers feared to halt 
more than a few hours on either side of the Isthmus. 
Yellow fever, intermittent and remittent fevers, and 
all sorts of other tropical maladies made it their 
favourite home. 

A still more remarkable contrast, however, between 
these two necks of land lies in the part they have respec- 
tively played in human affairs. The Isthmus of Panama 
must, in far-off prehistoric days, have been the highway 
along which those wandering tribes whose forefathers 
had passed in their canoes from northeastern Asia 
along the Aleutian Isles into Alaska found their way, 
after many centuries, into the vast spaces of South 
America. But its place in the annals of mankind 
during the four centuries that have elapsed since 



4 SOUTH AMERICA 

Balboa gazed from a mountain top rising out of the 
forest upon the far-off waters of the South Sea has been 
small, indeed, compared to that which the Isthmus 
of Suez has held from the beginning of history. It 
echoed to the tread of the armies of Thothmes and 
Rameses marching forth on their invasions of western 
Asia. Along the edge of it Israel fled forth before the 
hosts of Pharaoh. First the Assyrian and afterwards 
the Persian hosts poured across it to conquer Egypt; 
and over its sands Bonaparte led his regiments to 
Palestine in that bold adventure which was stopped at 
St. Jean d'Acre. It has been one of the great highways 
for armies for forty centuries, as the canal cut through 
it is now one of the great highways of commerce. 

The turn of the Isthmus of Panama has now come, 
and curiously enough it is the Isthmus of Suez that 
brought that turn, for it was the digging of a ship canal 
from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and the vast 
expansion of Eastern trade which followed, that led 
to the revival of the old designs, mooted as far back 
as the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, of pierc- 
ing the American Isthmus. Thus the comparison of the 
two isthmuses becomes now more interesting than 
ever, for our generation will watch to see whether the 
commerce and politics of the western world will be 
affected by this new route which is now being opened, 
as those of the Old World have been affected by the 
achievement of Ferdinand de Lesseps. 

So many books have been written, and so many 
more will be written, about the engineering of the 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 5 

Panama Canal and about its commercial possibilities, 
that of these very little need be said in such a sketch 
as this. But, as everybody is already curious, and 
will, two years hence, be still more curious regarding 
the region it traverses, I shall try to convey some sort 
of notion of the physical aspects of the Isthmus and 
of the impressions its past and its present make on 
the traveller's mind. In taking the reader with me 
across the neck of land, I shall in the first instance say 
nothing of the works of the canal which I saw in course 
of execution, but will ask him to remember that it runs, 
as does the Trans-Isthmian railway, from north to 
south, the coast line both on the Atlantic and on the 
Pacific side trending in this region east and west. 1 

Approaching in the steamer from Europe or New 
York across the Caribbean Sea one sees low hills rising 
gently from the shore, fringed with palms and dotted 
with small white houses half hidden among the trees. 
In front, on an islet now joined to the mainland, is the 
town of Colon, a new town, with a statue of Christopher 
Columbus "protecting" a female Indian figure of 
America, but no buildings of interest and little history, 
for it is only sixty years old, built as the terminal point 
of the railway. The old fortified ports where the 
Spanish galleons used to lie at anchor in former days, 
Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello, stand farther to 
the east. Behind the town, higher hills, covered with 
those thick, light green woods that characterize the 

1 The reader will find at the end of the volume a small map which 
may help him to understand the topography of the region. 



6 SOUTH AMERICA 

tropics, cut off the view to the south. No depression 
in the land is visible. There is nothing to suggest that 
another ocean lies beyond, only fifty miles away, and 
that here the great backbone which traverses two 
continents for many thousands of miles sinks to a 
point a few hundreds of feet above sea level. 

The traveller on landing steps into the railroad car, 
and after running for three miles along the shore of the 
shallow bay of Limon into which the Canal is to issue, 
strikes in four miles more the valley of the Chagres 
River. Here is the point (to be described later) at 
which the huge Gatun Dam is being built across that 
valley to flood it and turn it into a navigable lake. 
Thence the line keeps in the same general south-south- 
east direction on the east side of the Chagres River, 
parallel to its course. The Chagres, a muddy and 
rather languid stream, has in the dry season about as 
much water as the Scottish Tweed and in the wet sea- 
son rather more than the Potomac and much more 
than the Shannon. There are few stations on the way, 
and at first no dwellings, for the country was unin- 
habited till the work of canal construction began. Mo- 
rasses are crossed, and everywhere there is on each side a 
dense, dark forest. So deep and spongy are the swamps 
that in places it has been found impossible to fill them 
up or to lay more than one set of rails upon the surface. 
So dense is the forest, the spaces between the tree trunks 
filled by shrubs and the boughs bound together by 
climbing plants into a wall of living green, that one 
cannot see more than a few yards into the thicket, 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 7 

and can force a way through it only by the help of the 
machete, — that long, cutlass-like knife which people 
carry in Spanish America. Hardly a trail running 
into the woods is seen, and a mile or two back the wild 
cats and monkeys, and their terrible enemies, the ana- 
condas or boa constrictors, have the place all to them- 
selves. V 
After some twenty-three miles of this sort of country, 
beautiful when the outer boughs of the trees are gay 
with brilliant blossoms, and pendulous orchids sway 
in the breeze between their stems, but in September 
rather monotonous in color, the railway crosses and 
leaves the Chagres River, whose valley turns north- 
east far in among higher hills. The line continues 
to run southward, rising gently between slopes from 
which the wood has been lately cut away so that 
one can see the surrounding landscape. All around 
there is a sort of tossing sea of miniature moun- 
tains — I call them mountains because of their steep 
slopes and pointed crests, though few of them exceed a 
thousand feet in height. These are set so close together 
that hardly a dozen yards of level ground can be found 
between the bases of their declivities, and are disposed 
so irregularly that they seem as if the product of 
scattered outbreaks and uplifts of igneous rock. Their 
sides are clothed and their tops plumed with so thick 
a growth of wood that the eye cannot discover crags 
or cliffs, if any there be, and the tops of all are practi- 
cally unapproachable, because no trails have yet been 
cut, except to one conspicuous summit. This one 



8 SOUTH AMERICA 

rises boldly to a height of about 1200 feet, and has 
received the name of Balboa Hill, because from it 
alone in this region — so one is told — can both oceans 
in a season of fair weather be descried. The gallant 
Vasco Nunez deserves the honour of being thus com- 
memorated ; but it is to be feared that before long the 
legend will have struck root among those who dwell 
here, and will be repeated to those who pass along the 
canal, that it was from this height, and not from a peak 
in Darien, seventy or eighty miles farther to the east, 
that the bold adventurer first looked out over the 
shining expanse of the South Sea. 

We are now more than halfway to the Pacific and 
may pause to survey the landscape. Though there is 
moisture everywhere, one sees no water, for neither 
ocean is visible, the Chagres is hidden among the folds 
of the hills, and the brooks at the valley bottoms are 
insignificant. But otherwise it is cheerful and pleasant 
in its bright green and its varied lines, — a country in 
which a man might be content to live, faintly remind- 
ing one of the Trossachs in Scotland by the number of 
steep little peaks crowded together and by the profusion 
of wood. The luxuriance of nature is, however, far 
greater than in any temperate clime, and the trees 
have that feathery lightness which belongs to the 
tropics, their tops springing like green bubbles into the 
soft blue air. 

Here, at a place called Culebra, is the highest part of 
the crossing from ocean to ocean, 110 feet above sea- 
level ; and as it was here that the deepest cutting had 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 9 

to be made for the canal it is here that the head- 
quarters of the engineering staff has been fixed. Of the 
cutting more anon. The railway follows a devious 
course among the hills, rattling here and there through 
cuttings in hard igneous rock, and in a few miles 
descending gently, it passes out into a wide valley, 
the farther end of which, to the south, is open, with 
a bold hill guarding it on the east side and several 
more distant rocky eminences visible far away against 
the horizon. The hill is Ancon, overlooking Panama 
city on the one side, and, on the other, the bay which 
the canal enters. The eminences are islands lying 
out in the Pacific. Being now quite down on the 
level of the oceau, we do not see its waters till the rail- 
way, passing along the edge of a brackish tidal swamp, 
reaches the city of Panama, forty-six miles from Colon. 
As the Pacific side of the Isthmus is much the 
most picturesque part of the whole, and impresses 
itself most on the imagination, the visitor who de- 
sires to enjoy the scenery and grasp the configuration 
of land and sea, ought to climb, if he is an active 
walker, to the top of the hill of Ancon, on the lower 
slopes of which, rising just above Panama city, are 
the United States government offices and the villas 
of its officials. Steep everywhere, and in parts slip- 
pery also, is the foot-path that leads over pastures and 
through thickets to the top of the hill, some six hundred 
feet high. But it is worth while to make the ascent, 
for from the summit one obtains an ample prospect 
worthy of the historic greatness of the spot. 



10 SOUTH AMERICA 

From this breezy height let the traveller turn his 
eyes first to the north, and look back over that maze 
of low forest-covered mountains through which he has 
passed from Colon and which form the watershed 
between the two seas. No more from this side of the 
Isthmus than from the other does one discern any 
depression in the watershed, any break in the range 
sufficient to indicate that at this point there is an easy 
passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The hollows 
through which both railroad and canal pass are hidden 
deep in the folds of the hills, which stand so thick 
together that it is hard to believe any waterway could 
ever be carved out between them and impossible to tell 
the spot where the cutting is being made. 

Very different is the view when the gaze is turned east- 
ward along the far- win ding bays and promontories of 
the Gulf of Panama. There the coast is for a long space 
flat, and a plain runs back toward distant hills. Beyond 
this plain other ranges rise to the southeast, bordering 
the Pacific till they sink below the horizon opposite the 
Pearl Islands. Somewhere among those ranges is the 
height to which Balboa climbed and whence he made 
the great discovery; somewhere along those shores the 
place where, clad in armour, he strode into the waves, 
and with sword drawn, took possession of the sea on 
behalf of the king of Spain. It is rather across that 
plain that any one looking from this side might fancy 
the lowest passage from sea to sea would be found. 
Yet not there, but much farther to the southeast, 
far behind the hills, in the Gulf of Darien, there is 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 11 

a point still lower, where between the Atrato River 
which falls into the Caribbean and the River San Juan 
running to the Pacific a few miles of cut would enable 
a ship to pass from sea to sea. Now let the traveller 
turn round and face to the west. His eyes will follow 
a long mountain chain which rises high and bold from 
the opposite shore of the Gulf of Panama and runs out 
southwest until it too is lost to sight beneath the far hori- 
zon. In front, a group of rocky isles lies basking in the 
sunny sea. Just beneath the Ancon hill, at its eastern 
foot, the little city of Panama stands on its promontory, 
a mass of grey, red-roofed houses with a half-demolished 
Spanish fort of the eighteenth century guarding the 
shallow roadstead, while on the opposite side of the 
hill, at the base of its steep slopes, is the mouth of 
the Canal. 

The landscape spread out under this hill of Ancon is 
the finest in all the Isthmian region. The northern 
side at Colon, although pretty with its abundant ver- 
dure, is commonplace ; but here there is a view which 
appeals at once to the eye and to the imagination, 
ranging over vast stretches of land and sea, rich with 
varied colour, bringing together the past and the 
future. Over these smooth ocean plains, which the 
Spaniards, accustomed to their own stormy Atlantic, 
called the Peaceful Sea, Vasco Nunez de Balboa 
looked eagerly out as he planned that expedition to 
Peru which the jealous cruelty of Pedrarias, the Spanish 
viceroy, cut short. Over them the less worthy but more 
fortunate Pizarro sailed to those far southern lands, 



12 SOUTH AMERICA 

where he won, in two years, an empire vaster than 
that which in the Old World obeyed his sovereign, 
Charles the Fifth. Backward and forward across these 
waters came the fleets that bore to the south swarms of 
fierce adventurers to plunder the native peoples, and 
that brought back the treasures which supported the 
European wars of Spain and helped to work her ruin. 
Three miles off there can be just discerned amid the 
trees the ancient cathedral tower of the now ruined city 
of old Panama, where those fleets used to anchor till the 
English buccaneer Morgan sacked and destroyed the 
place in 1679. And just beneath, on the opposite side 
of the hill from these traces of the vanished colonial 
empire of Spain, the long mole that is to shield the 
mouth of the Canal is rising, and the steamships lying 
along the wharves, and cars standing beside them on 
the railway tracks, presage a commerce vaster than ever 
was seen in the great days of Spain, for they speak 
of the passage of men from all the nations along the new 
waterway through these forests and out over this sea 
to the ends of the earth. Here, as at the Straits of 
Gibraltar and on the Bosphorus, nature and history 
have joined to give delight for the eyes, and to the 
mind musings on the past and dim forecasting visions 
of the future. 

Save for these few points where human dwellings are 
seen, — the little Spanish city below and the offices 
and warehouses that mark the beginnings of the new 
commercial port and some houses on the islets in the 
bay, where the inhabitants of Panama seek in summer 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 13 

a cooler air, — it is a lonely landscape, with scarcely 
a sign of life on land, and as yet few ships flecking 
the water. The region has always been thinly peopled 
and its tribes never reached the semi-civilization of the 
Maya peoples of Yucatan, Honduras, and Guatemala 
to the north of them, nor of the Chibchas of Bogota to 
the south. There are, anyhow, no traces of prehistoric 
progress here, though some have been found in Costa 
Rica. The aborigines were not numerous in this region, 
and, after the Spaniards came, were quickly reduced 
by the attacks which gold-seeking adventurers made 
upon them. Thus one hears of but few now, except at 
one place, called San Bias, on the shore of the Caribbean 
Sea, some forty miles east of , Colon. There an Indian 
tribe has kept itself quite apart from the white intru- 
ders, having maintained a practical independence both 
of Spanish viceroys and republican presidents of Colom- 
bia. These Indians are short, strong men, good sailors 
and fine fighters, men of the same stock that repulsed 
the first settlers whom Columbus planted near by on his 
second voyage, and so jealous of their freedom and their 
own ways that they will not suffer a white stranger to 
spend the night in one of their villages. They are re- 
ported to be still heathens, having their own medicine 
men, the efficiency of whom is secured by a rule which 
terminates the professional career together with the life 
of a practitioner who has lost to death seven patients 
in succession. These Indians come to Colon in their 
canoes to trade, and show themselves passably friendly 
to the Americans there, though less effusively so than 



14 SOUTH AMERICA 

their ancestors were to the English in those far-awaji 
days when they guided English buccaneers across the 
Isthmus to pounce upon their Spanish enemies at 
Panama. When in 1698 the Scottish colonists arrived 
on their ill-starred expedition to found a colony at 
Darien, the San Bias men welcomed them with open 
arms and shewed their good feeling by frequently com- 
ing on board and drinking a great deal of liquor. 
These kindly dispositions lasted down till our own 
time, for a tale goes that in one of their struggles 
against the Colombians they declared themselves 
subjects of Queen Victoria. The Republic of Panama, 
having plenty of troubles of its own, wisely leaves them 
alone. 

As there are few Indians now in the narrowest part 
of the Isthmus, so also there are few white people. 
The Spaniards never tried to settle the country, though 
they built towns here and there on the coast for trade. 
There was neither gold nor silver to attract adventurers. 
The land was covered with jungle, and there was a lack 
of native labourers to be enslaved and set to clear 
and till it. The jealous policy of the home govern- 
ment excluded the subjects of all other powers, so most 
of this region remained a wilderness, unimproved, and 
parts of it unexplored. A paved road was constructed 
across the Isthmus from old Panama, the town built by 
Pedrarias when he crossed to the Pacific side in 1520, 
to Nombre de Dios, which became the chief port on the 
Atlantic side; and along this road pack mule trains 
carried the silver that had come up from Peru to be 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 15 

shipped for Cadiz or Vigo in those great galleons for 
which the English seamen used to lie in wait. On 
the Atlantic coast there was held once a year a great 
fair which lasted six weeks, and to which trading 
folk came by sea from far and wide. Nearly all the 
manufactured goods which were consumed in Peru and 
all down the west coast were sold and bought here. 
Little else broke the monotonous annals of these remote 
provinces except the exploits of the English sea-rovers 
who carried on the war of Protestantism against Spain 
for the benefit of their own pockets. Sir Francis Drake, 
the least sordid and most gallant among them, began 
his exploits by establishing himself in a creek on the At- 
lantic side of the Isthmus, and thence took Nombre de 
Dios with a ridiculously small force, and laid ambushes 
for the silver-carrying mule trains that crossed from Pa- 
nama, raiding at intervals such Spanish ports as his small 
force enabled him to capture. In one early expedition, 
he climbed a tree on a hilltop, and seeing the Pacific 
from it, fell on his knees and prayed God to give him 
life till he could sail upon that sea in an English ship 
— a prayer which was amply fulfilled when he issued 
from the Straits of Magellan and ravaged the coasts 
of Peru in 1578. In the last of all his cruises it was 
in his ship off Puerto Bello that he died in 1596. 
Eighty years later, Morgan, the famous English buc- 
caneer, gathered a large force of adventurers and sea- 
faring ruffians, crossed the Isthmus by sailing in small 
boats up the Chagres and thence after a short land 
journey falling upon Panama, which he took and pil* 



16 SOUTH AMERICA 

laged, bringing back his booty to the Caribbean Sea. 
The city was burned, whether by him or by the Span- 
iards remains in doubt, and thereafter it lay deserted. 

Thirty years after Morgan's raid the commercial 
possibilities of the Isthmus fascinated a Scotsman who 
had more than the usual fervour and less than the 
usual caution of his nation. William Paterson, the 
founder of the Bank of England, led a colony, chiefly 
composed of Scottish people, and well supplied with 
Scottish ministers, to a place near Acla in the Gulf of 
Darien, on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, one hundred 
miles southeast of Colon, meaning to make it a great 
centre of trade over both oceans. They went out, 
however, imperfectly equipped and ignorant of cli- 
matic conditions. Many perished from disease ; King 
William III gave them no support ; the Spaniards at 
last attacked and compelled the surrender of the few who 
remained. Thereafter nobody disturbed the subjects of 
the Catholic king. New Panama, planted in a better 
site where the roadstead is a little deeper, although too 
shallow for the ocean liners of our own day, continued to 
enjoy a certain prosperity as the gateway to all western 
South America, for there was and could be no land 
transit through the trackless forests and rugged moun- 
tains that lie along the coast between the Isthmus and 
the Equator. But the decline and decay of the colonial 
empire of Spain under the most ill-conceived and ill- 
administered scheme of government that selfishness and 
stupidity ever combined to devise, steadily reduced the 
importance of the city. Nothing was done to develop 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 17 

the country, which remained, outside Panama and a 
few other ports, an unprofitable solitude. Neither did 
the extinction of the rule of Spain, which came quietly 
here because the local governor did not resist it, 
make any difference. Occupied with domestic broils, 
the new republic, first called New Granada and now 
Colombia, had not the capital nor the intelligence nor 
the energy to improve the country or develop the com- 
mercial possibilities of the Isthmus. This was a task 
reserved for children of the race which had produced 
Drake and Morgan. 

Thus we come down to the events which have given 
Panama its present importance. In 1846 Mexico was 
forced to cede to the United States, as the price of 
peace, the territories which now constitute the States of 
California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Soon 
afterwards gold was discovered in California, and a 
great inrush of settlers followed. There was urgent 
need for some shorter and safer route to San Francisco 
than the voyage round Cape Horn or the waggon trail 
over plains and mountains from the Missouri. Three 
enterprising Americans obtained in 1848 a concession 
of the right to build a railway across the Isthmus. The 
line was opened in 1855, and had, till taken over by the 
United States government, paid higher dividends con- 
tinuously (an average down to 1895 of about 15 per 
cent per annum) than any other line in the world. 
Being exposed to no competition, it could charge 
what fares it pleased. A better service of passenger 
steamers began to run from Panama southward as 



18 SOUTH AMERICA 

well as northward ; and thenceforward, despite its 
deadly climate, the Isthmus became a world highway. 
Though the subsequent opening of railroads across 
the North American continent reduced the passenger 
traffic from the eastern United States to California via 
Panama, the goods or freight traffic continued ; and as 
trade to western South America increased, so the old idea 
of constructing an interoceanic canal took more definite 
shape and led to the propounding of scheme after 
scheme. Finally, in 1878, the success which Ferdinand 
de Lesseps had achieved at Suez encouraged him to 
form a company in France to make a sea-level water- 
way through the Isthmus. This company, formed 
without sufficient preliminary investigation of the con- 
ditions and the cost, collapsed in 1889, having ex- 
hausted its funds. A second one, formed in 1894 to 
resume and complete the enterprise, failed in its turn, 
after spending many millions, and in 1904 transferred 
all its rights and interests, together with its plans and 
its machinery, to the United States government, who, 
after about two years usefully spent in examining 
the problem they had to face, began in 1907 that 
effective work of digging and lock-building which they 
expect to complete in 1913. They had for some time 
been trying to obtain a grant from the republic of Co- 
lombia of the strip of land required for the excavation of 
the Canal, but could not secure terms which they thought 
reasonable. Then, in 1903, a revolt took place at Pan- 
ama against the authority of Colombia, and the new 
republic of Panama, which forthwith emerged, gave to 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 19 

the United States a perpetual lease of a strip of ten 
miles wide, being the space through which the purposed 
canal was to run. This strip — now called the Canal 
Zone — is forty-five miles long, with an area of about 
448 square miles. The United States Government is 
practically supreme in it, — though it has been held 
not to be a part of the United States for the purposes of 
the Constitution, — and rules it by a Commission under 
the War Department, being also owner of more than 
two-thirds of its surface. In return for the lease it has 
paid a large sum to the little republic and guaranteed 
its independence. With the strip it has also acquired 
four small islands, deemed valuable strategically, which 
lie a little way off the shore opposite the Pacific end of 
the Canal. They are now to be fortified to protect the 
approach. The colonial city, with its picturesque fort 
looking out over the sea, its pretty little plazas planted 
with trees, its winding old-fashioned streets and big 
dark churches, stands within the Canal Zone, but is 
administered by its own government, being the capital 
of this smallest of all the South American republics. 
The poorer classes occupy themselves with fishing and 
sitting in the shade, the upper classes with politics. 
There is hardly any cultivated land near, but it is 
hoped that on the high undulating ground some miles 
to the west the cultivation of vegetables and fruits and 
whatever else passing vessels may need will presently 
be established. 

Of the Canal itself a few words must now be said, 
just enough to convey some preliminary general notion 



20 SOUTH AMERICA 

of it to those who two years hence, when the time foi 
its formal opening arrives, will be deluged with details. 

It will be fifty miles in length, from deep water to 
deep water, though only forty from tide-end to tide-end. 
The minimum bottom width will be three hundred feet, 
the minimum depth forty-one feet, the breadth and 
depth being, however, for the larger part of its length, 
greater than these figures. Its highest point above sea- 
level will be eighty-five feet at the surface of the water 
and forty feet at the bottom, the depth at this point 
being forty-five feet ; i.e. it will be cut down through 
the dividing ridge of the Continent to a point forty 
feet above the two oceans. 

The simplest way to realize its character is to con- 
sider it as consisting of four sections which I will call 
(a) the Atlantic Level, (b) the Lake, (c) the Cutting, 
and (d) the Pacific section (in two levels separated by 
a lock). The Atlantic Level is a straight channel, 
unbroken by locks, of eight miles, from deep water 
at the mouth of the shallow Bay of Limon, a little 
west of Colon, to Gatun, where it reaches the valley 
of the Chagres River. Now the Chagres River had 
always been reckoned as one of the chief difficulties 
in the way of making a canal. It occupied the bottom 
of that natural depression along which all surveyors 
had long ago perceived that any canal must run. But 
the difficulty of widening and deepening the river 
channel till it should become a useable canal, was a 
formidable one, because in the wet season the river 
swells to an unmanageable size under the tropical rains, 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 21 

sometimes rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours. 
This difficulty was at last met and the stream in- 
geniously utilized by erecting right across the course 
of the Chagres a stupendous dam at Gatun, which 
by impounding the water of the river turns its valley 
into a lake. This lake will have along the central 
channel a depth of from eighty-five to forty-five feet of 
water, sufficient for the largest ship. At the Gatun 
dam there are three locks, built of concrete, with a total 
rise of eighty-five feet, by which vessels will be lifted 
up into the lake. The lake will fill not only the valley 
of the Chagres itself, but the bottom of its tributary 
valleys to the east and west, so that it will cover 164 
square miles in all, and will be dotted by many islands. 
The central and deepest line of this artificial piece of 
water, nearly twenty-four miles long, is the second of 
our four canal sections, and will be the prettiest, for 
the banks are richly wooded. At the point called Bas 
Obispo, where the Chagres valley, which has been 
running south-southeast towards the Pacific turns 
away to the northeast among the hills, the line of the 
canal leaves the Gatun river-lake, and we enter the third 
section, which I have called the Cutting. Here hills are 
encountered, so it became necessary, in order to avoid 
the making of more locks, to cut deep into the central 
line of the continent, with its ridge of rock which con- 
nects the Cordilleras of the southern continent with the 
Sierras of the northern. After five miles of compara- 
tively shallow cutting southward from the Lake, a tall 
and steep eminence, Gold Hill, the continental water- 



22 SOUTH AMERICA 

shed, its top 665 feet high, bars the way. Through it 
there has been carved out a mighty gash, the " Culebra 
Cut," of which more anon. A little further south, eight 
miles from the Lake, the ground begins to fall rapidly 
towards the other sea, and we reach the fourth or 
Pacific section at a point called Pedro Miguel. Here 
is a lock by which the Canal is lowered thirty feet to 
another but much smaller artificial lake, formed by a 
long dam built across the valley at a spot called Mira- 
flores, where we find two more locks, by which vessels 
will be lowered fifty-five feet to the level of the 
Pacific. Thence the Canal runs straight out into the 
ocean, here so shallow that a deep-water channel has 
been dredged out for some miles, and a great dyke or 
mole erected along its eastern side to keep the south- 
erly current from silting up the harbour. From Pedro 
Miguel to Miraflores it is nearly two miles, and from 
the locks at the latter to the Pacific eight miles, so the 
length of this fourth Pacific section, which, unlike the 
Atlantic section, is on two different levels divided by 
the Miraflores dam and locks, is ten miles. In it there 
has been comparatively little land excavation, because 
the ground is flat, though a great deal of dredging, 
both to carry a sea channel out through the shallow 
bay into the open Pacific, and also to provide space for 
vessels to he and load or discharge without blocking 
the traffic. 

Thus the voyager of the future, in the ten or twelve 
hours of his passage from ocean to ocean, will have 
much variety. The level fight of the fiery tropic dawn 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 23 

will fall on the houses of Colon as he approaches it in 
the morning, when vessels usually arrive. When his 
ship has mounted the majestic staircase of the three 
Gatun locks from the Atlantic level, he will glide 
slowly and softly along the waters of a broad lake which 
gradually narrows toward its head, a lake enclosed by 
rich forests of that velvety softness one sees in the 
tropics, with vistas of forest-girt islets stretchiug far 
off to right and left among the hills, a welcome change 
from the restless Caribbean Sea which he has left. 
Then the mountains will close in upon him, steep 
slopes of grass or brushwood rising two hundred feet 
above him as he passes through the great Cut. From 
the level of the Miguel lock he will look southward 
down the broad vale that opens on the ocean flooded 
with the light of the declining sun, and see the 
rocky islets rising, between which in the twilight 
his course will he out into the vast Pacific. At Suez 
the passage from sea to sea is through a dreary and 
monotonous waste of shifting sand and barren clay. 
Here one is for a few hours in the centre of a verdant 
continent, floating on smooth waters, shut off from 
sight of the ocean behind and the ocean before, a 
short sweet present of tranquillity between a stormy 
past and a stormy future. 

In these forty miles of canal (or fifty if we reckon 
from deep water to deep water) the two most remark- 
able pieces of engineering work are the gigantic dam 
(with its locks) at Gatun and the gigantic cutting at 
Culebra, each the hugest of its kind that the world has 



24 SOUTH AMERICA 

to shew. The dam is nearly a mile and a half long; 
its base nearly half a mile thick, and it is 400 feet wide 
at the water line of the lake which it will support. Each 
of the three locks is double, so that one of the pair can 
be used by vessels passing from north to south, the 
other by those passing from south to north. Each has 
a useable length of 1000 feet, a useable width of 110 
feet. They are big enough in length, width, and depth 
for the largest vessels that were afloat in 1911. He 
who stands inside one of them seems, when he looks 
up, to be at the bottom of a rocky glen, "a canyon 
of cement." Nothing less than an earthquake will 
affect them, and though earthquakes have been de- 
structive in Costa Rica, two hundred miles away, there 
is no record of any serious one here. The locks will be 
worked, and vessels will be towed through them, by 
electric power, which is to be generated by the fall of 
the Chagres River over the spillway which carries its 
water from the lake to the Atlantic. 

The great Culebra Cut is interesting not only to the 
engineer, but also to the geologist, as being what he calls 
a Section. It is the deepest open cutting anywhere in 
the world, and shows curious phenomena in the injection 
of igneous rocks, apparently very recent, among the loose 
sedimentary beds, chiefly clays and soft sandstones of 
the latest tertiary epoch. A troublesome result, partly 
of this intermixture, and partly of the friability and 
instability not only of the sedimentary strata but also of 
some of the volcanic rocks, has been noted in the con- 
stant slips and slides of rock and earth down the sides 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 25 

of the cutting into the bed of the canal that is to be. 
This source of expense and delay was always foreseen 
by those who knew the character of the soil and the 
power of torrential tropical rains, and was long dwelt 
upon as a fatal objection to a sea-level canal. It has 
caused even more delay and more expenditure than was 
expected. But it has now been overcome, though to 
avert the risk of future damage to the work when com- 
pleted the engineers have been obliged to give a much 
lower slope to the sides of the cutting than was originally 
contemplated, so that the width of the cutting at the 
top is also greater than had been planned, and the 
quantity of material excavated has been correspond- 
ingly larger. 1 In order to lessen further washing down, 
the slopes will be sown with creeping grasses and other 
plants calculated to hold the surface soil. 

The interior of the Culebra Cut presented, during 
the period of excavation, a striking sight. Within the 
nine miles of the whole cutting, two hundred miles of 
railroad track had been laid down side by side, some on 
the lowest level on terraces along which the excavat- 
ing shovels were at work. Within the deepest part of 
the cutting, whose length is less than a mile, many 
hundreds of railroad construction cars and many 
thousands of men were at work, some busy in setting 
dynamite charges for blasting, some clearing away the 

1 The highest point of excavation at Gold Hill is 534 feet above 
sea level and the highest elevation of the original surface of the 
ground along the centre line of the Canal was 312 feet above sea 
level. The vertical depth of the cut on the eentre line is thus 272 
feet, the bottom of the cut being 40 feet above sea level. 



26 SOUTH AMERICA 

rubbish scattered round by an explosion, some work- 
ing the huge moving shovels which were digging into 
the softer parts of the hill or were removing the mate- 
rial loosened by explosions, the rest working the trains 
of cars that were perpetually being made up and run 
out of the cutting at each end to dump the excavated 
material wherever it was needed somewhere along the 
line of the Canal. Every here and there one saw little 
puffs of steam, some from the locomotives, some where 
the compressed air by which power was applied to the 
shovels was escaping from the pipes, and condensing 
the vapour-saturated atmosphere. 

There is something in the magnitude and the meth- 
ods of this enterprise which a poet might take as his 
theme. Never before on our planet have so much 
labour, so much scientific knowledge, and so much 
executive skill been concentrated on a work designed 
to bring the nations nearer to one another and serve 
the interests of all mankind. 

Yet a still more interesting sight is that which meets 
the visitor when, emerging from the cutting, he crosses 
to where, behind the western hill, are the quarters of 
the workers, 1 with the cottages of the chief engineer 
and his principal assistants on the top. The chief en- 
gineer, Colonel Goethals, is the head not only of the 
whole scheme of construction but of the whole ad- 

1 The unskilled labourers employed are mostly West Indian ne- 
groes from Jamaica and Barbadoes, with some Spaniards, but no 
Chinese. The skilled men are from the United States. Many Chi- 
nese were here in the French days and died in great numbers. 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 27 

ministration, and his energy, judgment, and power of 
swift decision are recognized to have been a prime factor 
in the progress of the work and the excellence of the 
administrative details. The houses, erected by the 
United States government, are each of them surrounded 
on every floor by a fine wire netting which, while freely 
admitting the air, excludes winged insects. All the 
hospitals have been netted so carefully that no insect 
can enter to carry out infection from a patient. Every 
path and every yard is scrupulously clean and neat. 
Not a puddle of water is left where mosquitoes can 
breed, for every slope and bottom has been carefully 
drained. Even on the grass slopes that surround the 
villas at An con there are little tile drains laid to carry 
off the rain. With the well-kept lawns and the gay 
flower-beds, the place has the air of a model village. 
And one sees the same in the other quarters of the 
employes all along the canal line, at Gatun, at Mira- 
flores, at Ancon, where is the great hospital and where 
have been set up the offices of the civil government 
which does everything for its employes, both white and 
coloured. Nowhere perhaps in the world are work- 
people so well cared for, and such ample and almost 
luxurious provision made for comfort and amusement 
as well as for health by the benevolent autocracy 
which presides over everything. Its success in es- 
caping all charges of partiality or corruption, as well 
as in producing efficiency in the work and content- 
ment among the workers, has indeed been such as to 
make some persons draw from it an argument in favour 



28 SOUTH AMERICA 

of State control of all great enterprises. To" the 
unbiassed observer it is rather an instance of the 
efficiency obtainable by vesting full administrative 
control in men whose uprightness and capacity have 
already been proved beyond question, who have not 
risen by political methods, and who have nothing to 
gain by any misuse of their powers. So far as any 
political moral can be drawn from the case, that moral 
recommends not democratic collectivism but military 
autocracy. 

In these wire nettings and drainage arrangements 
and hospital precautions, to which I have referred, 
more than in anything else is to be found the rea- 
son why, after the French effort to build the canal had 
twice failed, the present enterprise is succeeding. The 
French engineers had shown great skill and were doing 
their work well. No one admits their merits more 
fully than do, with the generous candour that belongs 
to true soldiers and true men of science, the American 
engineers who have come after them. But they had no 
means of fighting the yellow fever and the malaria that 
were frustrating all their skill and exhausting all their 
resources. The discovery, made while the United States 
troops were occupying Cuba after the war of 1898, 
that yellow fever is due to the bite of the Stegomyia 
carrying infection from a patient to a healthy per- 
son, and that intermittent fevers are due to the bite 
of the Anopheles, similarly bearing poison from the 
sick to the sound, made it possible to enter on a cam- 
paign for the prevention of these diseases among the 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 29 

workers on the Isthmus. This was done before ex- 
cavation began, and done so efficiently that the 
Isthmus is now as healthy as any part of the United 
States. No case of yellow fever has occurred since 
1905. The mortality is no higher than in the United 
States army generally. In 1910 the death rate among 
50,802 employes of both colours in the Canal Zone was 
10.98 per thousand, in 1911, among 48,876, it was 
11.02, — an extraordinarily low rate when compared 
with the average of European and North American 
cities. Among the American white employes and their 
families the rate was only 6.01. * The white employes 
and their families are healthy and fresh-looking, with 
none of that sickly brownish-yellow hue which usually 
marks the inhabitants of malarial districts. And I can 
confirm what many other visitors have told me, that one 
may be for days and nights on the Isthmus and neither 
see nor hear nor feel a mosquito. To have made one 
of the pest-houses of the world, a place with a reputa- 
tion like that of the Pontine Marshes, or Poti on the 
Black Sea, or Sierra Leone itself, as healthy as Boston 
or London is an achievement of which the American 
medical staff, and their country for them, may well be 
proud ; and the name of Colonel Gorgas, the head of 
that medical staff to whose unwearied zeal and care 
this achievement is largely due, deserves to stand on 

1 Among the white population of the Zone, excluding the cities of 
Panama and Colon, the rate was higher, viz. 16.47 for 1910 and 
15.32 for 1911, the part of the population not under official control 
being less eareful to observe health rules. 



30 SOUTH AMERICA 

the roll of fame beside that of Colonel Goethals, the 
chief engineer and Chairman of the Commission, who 
has directed, and is bringing to its successful issue, this 
whole great enterprise. 

The sanitation of the Canal Zone, following that of 
Havana, has done more than make possible the piercing 
of the Isthmus. It has opened up possibilities for the 
settlement by Europeans of, and for the maintenance of 
permanent European population in, many tropical dis- 
tricts hitherto deemed habitable by their natives only. 
To the effect of such an example one can hardly set 
bounds. 

In no previous age could an enterprise so vast as this 
have been carried through; that is to say, it would 
have required a time so long and an expenditure so 
prodigious that no rational government would have at- 
tempted it. Pharaoh Necho may have, as Herodotus 
relates, dug a canal across the Isthmus of Suez by the 
labour of hundreds of thousands of his subjects accus- 
tomed to implict obedience, but his ditch was prob- 
ably a small and shallow one, and it was through a 
dead level of sand and clay that it was dug. Here 
there was a mountain to pierce and a torrent to bridle, 
and the locks had to provide for vessels a thousand 
feet long. Nothing but the new forces which scientific 
discovery has placed in the hands of the modern 
engineer — steam, electricity, explosives of high power, 
machinery capable of raising and setting in their place 
one above another huge masses of cement — would 
have made the work possible. Yet even that was 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 31 

not enough. The French company possessed such 
appliances, and though their estimates of cost turned 
out to be based on totally inadequate data, the com- 
petence and energy of their engineers have never been 
questioned. And the French company failed hope- 
lessly ; and failed not merely because the work turned 
out heavier, and the loose strata giving way under the 
downpours of rain made the slides and landslips far 
worse, than was expected. 1 These things doubtless told 
against them, and much of the money raised never 
found its way to the Isthmus. But it was a more 
terrible force that foiled them. It was Pestilence, 
Pestilence coming on the gauzy wings of the mosquito. 
So little did they recognize their foe that when they 
built the large and commodious hospital at An con 
they provided, outside the windows, flower-boxes where 
stagnant water gathered and mosquitoes were hatched. 
Engineers died, foremen died, labourers were mown 
down by hundreds. Yet even if all the French capital 
had been properly spent and better sanitary measures 
had reduced the pestilential conditions, it may be 
doubted whether the French company could have made 
a success of the undertaking. More capital would have 

1 Fascinated by the example of Suez, and not realizing how greatly 
the problem of construction was affected by the difference between 
the very wet climate of Panama and the absolutely dry climate of 
Suez, the French engineers originally planned a sea-level canal. To 
have carried out that plan would have added enormously to the 
cost, for the Culebra cutting must have been not only eighty feet 
deeper, but immensely wider. Few who examine the spot seem 
now to doubt that the decision to have a lock canal has been a 



32 SOUTH AMERICA 

been needed, capital which must have been raised on 
onerous terms, and when it had all been spent and the 
work completed the profits of the canal could not, 
after providing for working expenses, have paid in- 
terest on half of the money borrowed. Whoever looks 
at this prodigious work feels that it could be carried 
through only by a nation commanding resources so 
overflowing that it does not need to care how much 
it spends, a nation which can borrow as much money 
as it pleases without sensibly affecting the quotations 
of its existing national debt. 

It is expected that the construction of the Canal will 
be found, when it is finished, to have cost nearly 
£80,000,000 C$400,000,000). 1 To this there will have 
to be added the cost of the fortifications it is intended 
to erect at Colon and on the islands that lie in the 
Gulf of Panama, opposite the south end of the Canal, 
as well as of barracks for the large garrison which is 
to defend it. The visitor who sees the slopes where 
these forts and batteries are to be placed asks who 
are the enemies whom it is desired to repel. Where 
is the great naval power that has any motive either 
of national enmity or of self-interest sufficient to in- 
duce it to face the risks of a war with a country so 
populous, so wealthy, and so vigorous as the United 
States? He is told that there is at present no such 
naval power, and that no quarter can be indicated 
whence danger will arise ; but that it is possible that 

1 The last estimate presented puts the amount at $ 375,000,000. 
The fortifications are expected to cost about $ 12,000,000 more. 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 33 

at some future time, from some unknown direction, 
some yet unconjectured enemy may arise against whose 
possible attacks provision ought now to be made. 

When the Canal has been opened and the interest 
now felt in getting it completed by the appointed day 
has ended, hardly less keen will be the interest in that 
other question on which men have speculated so long. 
What difference will this new waterway from ocean 
to ocean make to world commerce and therewith also, 
though probably in a less degree, to world politics? 
And what difference, to descend to smaller matters, 
will it make to the West Indies, and to the ports of 
the Gulf of Mexico, and (not so much commercially 
as politically) to the neighbouring states of Central and 
South America ? The political side of the matter is one 
too delicate to be discussed here, but upon the com- 
mercial one a word or two may be said. 

The new route will doubtless become an important 
route for the traffic in heavy freight from the Atlantic 
ports of the United States, and from European ports 
also, to the ports of western North America. 

It will similarly become the main freight line for goods 
of all kinds from both European and eastern North 
American ports to the west coast of South America as 
far south as Callao, and also from Gulf of Mexico ports 
as far as Coquimbo or Valparaiso. Whether the freight 
traffic from Europe to Valparaiso and the other ports of 
Chile will be greatly affected, is deemed more doubtful. 
Much will, of course, depend on the tolls fixed for transit 
through the Canal, which, by the treaty of 1901 be- 



34 SOUTH AMERICA 

tween Great Britain and the United States, are to be, 
like those at Suez, equal between all nations. 

The most interesting, because the largest, and also 
the most doubtful and complicated, question is as to 
the result upon European commerce to the Far East, 
— Japan, China, New Zealand, and Australia. It is 
the most complicated, because many factors enter into 
it, some of them political as well as commercial. Here 
the Canal will compete with the Suez Canal route, 
and (as respects Australia in particular) with the Cape 
of Good Hope route, and it will also compete with 
the steamship lines which now ply from Australia 
and New Zealand to England round Cape Horn. 
From England to all the Australasian and east 
Asiatic ports, except those of New Zealand, the Suez 
route will be shorter than that by Panama. 1 From 
New York, however, the route by Panama to Sydney, 
Auckland (New Zealand), and Shanghai will be shorter 
than that via Suez, while to Hong Kong and Manila it 
will be of practically the same length. It is generally 
supposed that the Panama tolls will be lower than those 
now imposed at Suez. Commerce, like other things, 
changes more quickly in our age than it did in any pre- 
vious age ; yet years may elapse before the full results 
of the opening of the Canal disclose themselves. Some 
of the commercial as well as the political consequences 
which have been due to the making of the Suez 
Canal were altogether unforeseen. If a dozen of the 

1 London to Sydney via Suez 11,531 miles, via Panama 12,525 ; 
London to Auckland via Suez 12,638 miles, via Panama, 11,404. 



THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA 35 

most important experts were, in 1914, to write out 
and place in the library of the British Museum and 
the library of Congress their respective forecasts bear- 
ing on this subject, sealed up and not to be opened till 
a.d. 2000, they might make curious reading in that 
latter year. 

The chief impressions which the scenery of the Isthmus 
makes on the traveller have already been indicated, — 
the contrast of the wildness and solitude of the region 
with its wonderful geographical position, which long 
ago seemed destined to make it a centre of commerce 
and population, the contrast of the advantages offered 
by that position with the slothful neglect of those ad- 
vantages by its Spanish rulers, the contrast one sees 
to-day between the busy crowd of workers along this 
narrow line cut out from the vast forest and the un- 
touched unpeopled nature on each side, the contrast 
between the black cloud of death that hung over it 
for four centuries and the sunshine of health and energy 
which medical science has now poured around it. 

But the strongest impression of all is that here one 
sees the latest, so far as can be foreseen, of any large 
changes which man is likely to try to work upon the 
surface of the earth. Tunnels longer than any yet 
made may be bored through mountains or carried under 
arms of the sea. The courses of rivers may be diverted. 
Reservoirs vaster than any we know may be constructed 
to irrigate arid tracts or supply electric power to cities, 
and bridges may be built to span straits like the Bos- 
phorus, or railroads, like that recently opened in south- 



36 SOUTH AMERICA 

ern Florida, be carried through the sea along a line of 
reefs. But nowhere else do there remain two conti- 
nents to be divided, two oceans to be connected, by a 
water channel cut through a mountain range. 

There is a tale that when the plan for digging a canal 
at Panama was first mooted, Philip the Second of Spain 
was deterred from it by the argument, pressed by his 
clerical advisers, that if the Almighty had wished the 
seas to be joined, He would have joined them, just as, 
according to Herodotus, the people of Knidus were de- 
terred by the Delphic oracle from cutting through the 
isthmus along which their Persian enemies could advance 
by land to attack them. If Zeus had wished the place 
to be an island, said the oracle, he would have made it 
one. But when an age arrived in which commercial and 
scientific views of nature prevailed against ecclesiastics, 
it became certain that here a canal would be some time 
or other made. Made it now has been. It is the great- 
est liberty Man has ever taken with Nature. 



CHAPTER II 

THE COAST OF PERU 

The first part of the voyage from Panama down 
the coast towards Peru is enjoyable when made in a 
steamer, for the sea is smooth, the southerly breeze is 
usually light, and after passing through the pictur- 
esque isles that lie off Panama one sees at no great dis- 
tance those Pearl Islands which at one time rivalled the 
isles of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf as the chief pearl 
fishery of the world. One wonders at the difficulties 
experienced by the first Spanish adventurers, Vasco 
Nunez de Balboa, and after him Pizarro, in their efforts 
to get south, but the reason is that a strong current 
sets into the Gulf, and against it and the prevailing 
south winds it was hard for the clumsy craft of those 
days to make progress. But on the second morning 
when we had got four or five hundred miles to the 
south, what was our surprise to find the temperature 
getting lower and the sky cloudier as we approached 
the equator. It was chilly that evening and we asked 
for blankets. Dreams of a delightful basking in the 
soft air of a sunlit sea were dispelled! We were en- 
tering cold weather, and it was to continue with us 
for thousands of miles, all the way to the Straits of 
Magellan. 

Everybody knows nowadays how largely the cli- 

37 



38 SOUTH AMERICA 

mate and the flora and the civilization of western 
Europe are due to the Gulf Stream. But one may 
suspect that few people have heard of an ocean current 
on the other side of America equal in length and vol- 
ume and scarcely less important in its influence on 
climate. The great Antarctic current, or Humboldt 
current, as it is sometimes called from the illustrious 
German who first scientifically observed and ex- 
plained it, carries up from southern Chile to some dis- 
tance north of the Equator a vast body of cold water 
which chills the atmosphere of the ocean and the coast 
and frequently covers them both with a roof of cloud. 
Before he crosses the Line, the traveller encounters 
this murky and ungenial weather, which excited the 
wonder of the early Spanish writers, who expected to find 
a zone just as torrid as they had found on the Atlantic. 
Seldom thereafter (during fully half the year) does he 
see clear blue sky, save for perhaps an hour or two 
each day, all the way southward as far as Valparaiso. 
The mists and clouds which this mass of cold water 
brings give the sun, the chief deity of the ancient Peru- 
vians of the inner country, no chance on the coast, 
while the fogs are so frequent as to be a source of 
anxiety to the navigator, and the clouds so thick that 
the great peaks of the Andes, though at some points 
only fifty or sixty miles distant, can rarely be seen from 
the ocean. 

But its cool and cloudy climate is only one of the 
singular features of the coast. From the Isthmus till 
one gets a little way south of the Equator at the Gulf 



THE COAST OF PERU 39 

of Guayaquil, the usual wet summer season of the 
tropics prevails and the abundant rains give to the 
highlands along the coast of Colombia and Ecuador 
splendid forests, which will one day be a source of 
wealth to those countries. But at this point, or to be 
more precise, about the boundary of Ecuador and Peru, 
near the town of Tumbez where Pizarro landed, the 
climatic conditions suddenly change, and there begins 
a rainless tract which extends down the coast as far as 
Coquimbo in 30° S. latitude. The vaporous moisture 
which the southeasterly trade winds bring up from 
the other side of the continent is most of it spent in 
showers falling on the eastern side of the Andes, and 
what remains is absorbed by the air of the dry plateaux 
between the parallel chains of that range, so that hardly 
any passes over to the western side of the mountains. 
The Antarctic current, cooling the air of the warmer 
regions it enters, creates plenty of mists but no rain, 
the land being warmer than the sea. Thus so much 
of the coast of western South America as lies between 
the ocean and the Cordillera of the Andes from 
Tumbez nearly to Valparaiso, for a distance of some 
two thousand miles, is dry and sterile. This strip of 
land varies in width from forty to sixty miles. It is 
crossed here and there by small rivers fed by the snows 
of the Andes behind, and along their banks are 
oases of verdure. Otherwise the whole coast of 
the strip is a bare, brown, and dismally barren 
desert. 

We had hoped before reaching the arid region to 



40 SOUTH AMERICA 

touch at the city of Guayaquil, which is the chief port 
and only place of commercial importance in the moun- 
tain republic of Ecuador. It had, however, been put 
under quarantine by Peru, owing to the appearance 
in it of yellow fever and the Oriental plague, so we had 
to pass on without landing, as quarantine would have 
meant a loss of eight or ten days out of our limited 
time. Ecuador is not the most progressive of the South 
American countries, and Guayaquil enjoys the reputa- 
tion of being the pest-house of the continent, rivalling 
for the prevalence and malignity of its malarial fevers 
such dens of disease as Fontesvilla on the Pungwe River 
in South Africa and the Guinea coast itself, and adding 
to these the more swift and deadly yellow fever, which 
has now been practically extirpated from every other 
part of South America except the banks of the Amazon. 
The city stands in a naturally unhealthy situation 
among swamps at the mouth of a river, but since 
Havana and Colon and Vera Cruz and Rio de Janeiro 
and even Santos, once the deadliest of the Brazilian 
ports, have all been purified and rendered safe, it seems 
to be high time that efforts should be made to improve 
conditions at a place whose development is so essen- 
tial to the development of Ecuador itself. 

Seeing far off the dim grey mountains around the 
Gulf of Guayaquil, but not the snowy cone of Chim- 
borazo which towers behind them, we touched next 
morning at our first Peruvian port, the little town of 
Payta, and here got our first impression of those South 
American deserts with which we were to become so 



THE COAST OF PERU 41 

familiar. It is a row of huts constructed of the whitish 
sun-baked mud called adobe which is the usual building 
material in the flat country, with two or three shipping 
offices and stores and a railway station, for a railway 
runs hence up the country to the old town of Piura. A 
stream from the Andes gives fertility to the long Piura 
valley which produces much cotton of an extremely fine 
quality. There are also oil wells not far off, so Payta 
does some business, offering as good an anchorage as 
there is on this part of the coast. We landed and 
climbed to the top of the cliffs of soft strata that rise 
steeply from the water, getting a wide view over the 
bay and to the flat-topped hills that rise fifteen miles 
or more inland. The sun had come out, the air was 
clear and fresh, and though the land was as unmiti- 
gated a bit of desert as I had ever seen, with only a 
few stunted, prickly, and woody stemmed plants sup- 
porting a feeble life in the hollows of the ground, still 
it was exhilarating to tread at last the soil of a new 
continent and receive a new impression. 

The first view of Peru answers very little to that 
impression of a wealthy land called up by the name of 
this country, more familiar and more famous in the 
olden days than that of any other part of the colonial 
empire of Spain. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that 
the wealth of Spanish Peru belonged more to her 
barren than to her fertile and populous regions. In 
the days of the Incas it was otherwise. They ruled 
over an agricultural people, and though they had gold 
in plenty, gold to them was not wealth, but material 



42 SOUTH AMERICA 

for ornaments. Apart, however, from agriculture, of 
which I shall speak later, the riches of Peru have 
consisted of three natural products, which belong to 
the drier tracts. These are the guano of the rainless 
islands off the coast, the nitrate deposits in the prov- 
ince of Tarapaca and the mines of silver and cop- 
per. Of these three, the guano has now been nearly 
exhausted, and while it lasted it enriched, not the 
country, but a succession of military adventurers. 
The nitrate regions have been conquered by Chile 
and seem unlikely ever to be restored. The most pro- 
ductive of the silver mines were taken away when 
Bolivia, in which they are situated, was erected into a 
separate republic, and such mines as remain in the 
High Andes, doubtless of great and not yet fully ex- 
plored value, are in the hands of foreign companies and 
syndicates. Little good have these bounties of nature 
done to the people of Peru, whether Spanish or 
Indian. 

From Panama to Payta the direct steamers take five 
days, and from Payta to Callao it is two days more, so 
the whole voyage is about as long as that from New 
York to Liverpool in the quick liners. This is one of the 
least troubled parts of the ocean; that is to say, gales 
are rare, and hurricanes, like those of the Caribbean, 
unknown. There is, however, usually a pretty heavy 
swell, and when there has been a storm some two or 
three hundred miles out to the west, the great rollers 
come in and make landing along the coast no easy 
matter. As the ship keeps too far out for the details of 



THE COAST OF PERU 43 

the coast to be visible, the voyage is rather monotonous, 
especially in the cloudy weather we encountered. Here 
in the Antarctic current one has lost the pleasure of 
watching the gauzy gleam of the flying fish, but sea- 
birds appear circling round the ship and pelicans 
abound in the harbour. Whales, following the cold 
water northward, are seen spouting and are beset and 
attacked by their enemy the thresher, while whenever 
the ship anchors in a roadstead to discharge or take in 
cargo, seals and sea lions gambolling among the waves 
give a little amusement. The crew were Chileans, — 
they are the only South Americans with a taste for the 
sea — the passengers mostly natives of the various re- 
publics along the coast, for these steamers furnish the 
only means of communication north and south, but there 
are usually some English commercial men and North 
Americans looking after their mining interests or pros- 
pecting for railways across the Andes. There is much 
more variety than one usually finds in an Atlantic liner, 
but much less than in a Mediterranean or Black Sea 
steamer, where on the same deck you may see the cos- 
tumes and hear the tongues of seven or eight nations. 
The Spanish-Americans are not very communicative to 
strangers, but whoever speaks their language can learn 
a good deal from them about minerals and revolutions, 
— the two chief products of the northwest coast. 

To sail along a coast without a chance of examining 
its natural beauties or the cities that stud it, is in most 
cases mortifying, but here in the six hundred miles be- 
tween Payta and Callao one has this consolation, that 



14 SOUTH AMERICA 

there is nothing to see, and you cannot see it. The 
shores are brown, bare and unpeopled, while the heavy 
cloud roof that hangs over the sea, hides the tops of the 
hills also, and cuts off all view of the snowy Cordillera 
far behind. The towns are few and small, because the 
land is sterile save where one of the Andean streams 
gives fertility to a valley. One would naturally suppose 
that the country had always been even as it is now. 
But the ruins of ancient cities here and there prove that 
it must once have been far more populous. A census 
taken soon after the Conquest shewed that there were 
in the Valley of Piura 193,000 Indians. In 1785 the 
inhabitants, then mostly negroes, numbered only 44,500. 
Of these ruins the largest are those of a city often called 
Chimu, from the title of the king who ruled there, near 
the town of Truxillo, to which Pizarro, when he founded 
it, gave the name of his own Estremaduran birthplace. 
The remains cover a wide space and shew that the people 
who dwelt here and in the other coast valleys must have 
made considerable advances toward civilization, for the 
pottery and other utensils are better in artistic style 
than any other remains found in South America. The 
kingdom of the Chimu was overthrown by the Incas a 
century before the Spanish Conquest, and nothing is 
known of the race except that its language, called Mo- 
chica, was quite different from that of the mountain 
tribes who obeyed the Incas. Whether the people 
perished under Spanish oppression, or whether they 
moved away, when in the confusion that followed the 
Conquest, the irrigation works that made cultivation 



THE COAST OF PERU 45 

possible were allowed to fall into decay — this is one 
of the many riddles of Peruvian history. 

Gazing from the deck hour after hour on this 
dreary coast, and remembering that the Atlantic side 
of the Continent in the same latitude is one of the best 
watered and richest parts of the tropics, one is struck 
by the unfortunate physical conditions that make useless 
a region whose climate, kept so cool by the Antarctic cur- 
rent would otherwise have fitted it for the development 
of progressive communities. Such communities did ex- 
ist among the subjects of the Chimu, but being con- 
fined to a few valleys, they were not strong enough to 
resist the impact of the more numerous mountain 
tribes. Thus it was only on the plateau behind that a 
great nation could grow up. With a moderate rainfall 
these six hundred miles of coast might have been one 
of the most fertile parts of South America, and the his- 
tory of Peru would have been altogether different. 
The absence of rain has provided a compensation in 
the form of a product which, though it cannot be used 
on the spot, became serviceable to other countries, and 
might have given Peru the means of developing mines 
or building railroads. The droppings of the swarms of 
sea-birds that frequent the rocky islands along the 
coast instead of being, as in other countries, washed 
away by showers, have accumulated till they formed 
those huge masses of guano which eighty years ago began 
to be carried away and sold to European countries as 
the most efficient fertilizers. The Inca sovereigns knew 
their value and are said to have protected the birds. 



46 SOUTH AMERICA 

Unfortunately, this easily obtained source of national 
wealth excited the cupidity of revolutionary leaders, 
each of whom fought for power because power meant 
the command of the revenue derivable from these de- 
posits. Not much is now left, and the republic has 
been none the better for them. Some of the largest 
were on the Chincha Islands. The islets are all bare, 
some shewing bold lines and sharp peaks which remind 
one of those that fringe the coast of Norway about 
the Arctic circle. 

The entrance to Callao, the port of the city of Lima, 
which lies seven miles inland and is five hundred feet 
higher, has a certain grandeur. A range of hills abuts 
on the sea, forming a bold cape, and opposite to it, 
leaving an entrance a mile or two wide, rises a lofty 
island, steep, bare and brown like the islands of the Red 
Sea, which reduces the long surges of the Pacific and 
gives a comparatively quiet anchorage in the spacious 
bay within. The town of Callao, consisting of steam- 
ship offices and warehouses and shops dealing in the 
things ships need, offers nothing of interest, except the 
remains of the fort of St. Philip, the last building where 
the flag of Spain floated on the mainland of the New 
World. So the traveller hurries by the steam railroad 
or the electric line up to Lima. 

We came full of the expectations stirred long ago by 
the fame of the city Pizarro built, and in which he 
ruled and perished, hoping to find in it another and 
a still more picturesque and more truly Spanish Mex- 
ico. It was long the first city of South America, into 



THE COAST OF PERU 47 

which the silver mines poured fabulous wealth. Its 
Viceroy was the greatest man in the Continent, a po- 
tentate whose distant master could seldom interfere 
with him, for there were no telegraphs or steam vessels 
in those days. Nobody but the archbishop could op- 
pose him ; nor need he fear anybody but the head of the 
Inquisition and the head of the Jesuits. The pomp that 
surrounded him, the pageants with which his entrance 
was celebrated, were like those of a Mogul Emperor. 

Lima was called by Pizarro the City of the Kings, 
i.e. the Three Wise Men of the East, but the name 
it now bears, a variant from that of the river Rimac, 
soon prevailed. It stands in a wide flat valley, guarded 
by steep mountains to the north, on both banks of 
the broad stony bed of the Rimac, a large part of 
whose waters has been diverted for irrigation. Except 
where this river water has made cultivation possible, 
the plain is bare, being part of the coastal desert. 
The high range of hills already mentioned guards the 
city on the north, and runs out to the sea on the 
northwest. Lofty spurs of the Andes are visible to 
the east, but for much of the year the clouds hang so 
low that the hills are hardly part of the landscape and 
the great peaks are seldom seen. 

As in most Spanish-American cities, the streets are 
narrow and straight, cutting one another at right angles. 
t)ne is at first surprised to find the houses extremely low, 
many of one story and hardly any (save a few new resi- 
dences on the outskirts) exceeding two stories, and to 
be told that they are built of bricks, or more commonly 



48 SOUTH AMERICA 

of cane and reeds plastered with mud. It is com- 
monly said that in Lima a burglar needs nothing 
more than a bowl of water and a sponge to soften the 
plaster, and a knife to cut the canes. But the reason 
is apparent when one remembers that no place on the 
West coast has suffered more from earthquakes. Thus, 
except the convents and some of the older churches, 
everything looks modern, unsubstantial, and also un- 
picturesque, having little variety and little ornament 
in the architecture except the long wooden balcony which 
usually projects above the gateway. The bridge that 
spans the Rimac is hardly worthy of a great capital. 
The shops are small and mediocre, and only in one or 
two thoroughfares is there any throng of passers to 
and fro. One notes little of the life and stir, and still 
less of the stateliness, that befits an ancient and famous 
home of power. 

Yet to this mediocrity there is one exception. It is 
the great central square. In a Spanish, as in an Italian, 
city, one usually enquires first for the Square, for what- 
ever nobleness a place has is sure to be there. The Plaza 
de Armas at Lima has much dignity in its ample space, 
and beauty in its fine proportions, in its central foun- 
tain, in the palms and flowering trees and statues which 
adorn it, besides a wealth of historic associations in the 
buildings that stand around it. Most conspicuous is 
the Cathedral, with its rich facade, its two quaint 
towers, its spacious interior, not broken, as are most of 
the great churches of Old Spain, by a central choir, its 
handsome carved choir stalls, its side chapel shrines, in 



THE COAST OF PERU 49 

one of which a glass case holds bones which tradition 
declares to be those of the terrible Pizarro. That pious 
conqueror founded the church in 1540, but earth- 
quakes have made such havoc with the walls that 
what one sees now is of much later date. At the 
opposite corner of the Plaza are the government offices, 
comparatively recent buildings, low, and of no archi- 
tectural interest. In the open arcade which borders 
them a white marble slab in the pavement marks the 
spot where Pizarro, cut down by the swords of his ene- 
mies, the men of Chile, made the sign of the cross with 
his own blood as he expired. The passage is still shown 
whence the assassins emerged from a house hard by 
the Cathedral, where they had been drinking together 
to nerve themselves, and crossed the Plaza to attack 
him in his palace. Also on the Plaza, facing the Cathe- 
dral, is the municipal building, from the gallery of 
which, nearly three centuries after the Inca power 
had fallen under the assault of Pizarro, General San 
Martin, the heroic Argentine who led the revolution- 
ary forces to the liberation of Peru, proclaimed to 
the crowd beneath the end of Spanish rule in South 
America. Of the old Palace of the Viceroys, which also 
fronted on the Plaza, there remains only the chapel, 
now desecrated and used as a storehouse for archives, 
whose handsome ceiling and walls, decorated with col- 
oured tiles of the sixteenth century, carry one back to 
the Moorish art of Spain. Other churches there are 
in plenty, — seventy-two used to be enumerated, — and 
some of them are large and grandiose in style, but all 



50 SOUTH AMERICA 

are of the same type, and none either beautiful or 
imposing. 

Few relics of antiquity are left in them or indeed any- 
where in Lima. The library of the University, the 
oldest seat of learning in America, which was formerly 
controlled and staffed by the Society of Jesus, suffered 
sadly at the hands of the Chilean invaders when they 
took the city in the war of 1882. The old hall of the 
Inquisition, in which the Peruvian Senate now sits, has 
a beautiful ceiling of dark red cedar richly carved, a 
work worthy of the best days of Spain. What scenes 
may it not have looked down upon during the three 
centuries when the Holy Office was a power at the 
name of which the stoutest heart in Lima trembled ! 
And out of the many fine old mansions of colonial days 
one has been preserved intact, with a beautiful gal- 
lery running along its four sides of a spacious patio 
(internal court), and in front a long-windowed, richly 
decorated balcony, a gem of the domestic architecture 
of the seventeenth century, perhaps the most per- 
fect, that earthquakes, fire, and war have permitted to 
survive in Spanish America. There is so little else to 
remember with pleasure from the days of the Viceroys 
and the Inquisitors that these relics of expiring artistic 
skill may be valued all the more. 

I am forced to confess that the high expectations with 
which we came to Lima were scarcely realized. The 
environs are far less beautiful than those of Mexico, 
and the city itself not only much smaller, but less stately, 
and wearing less of the air of a capital. Our apprecia* 



THE COAST OF PERU 51 

tion may perhaps have been dulled by the weather. We 
were told that the hills were pretty, but low clouds hid 
all but their bases from us; nor was there any sunshine 
to brighten the Plaza. For more than half the year, 
Lima has a peculiar climate. It is never cold enough to 
have a fire, but usually cold enough to make you wish 
for one. It never rains, but it is never dry; that is to 
say, it is not wet enough to make one hold up an um- 
brella, yet wet enough to soak one's clothes. Septem- 
ber was as dark as a London November, and as damp 
as an Edinburgh February, for the fog was of that 
penetrating and wetting kind which in the east of Scot- 
land they call a "haar." The climate being what it 
is, we were the more surprised to hear what the 
etiquette of courtship requires from a Limefio lover. 
Every novio (admirer) is expected to shew his devotion 
by standing for hours together in the evening under 
the window of the house in which the object of his ad- 
miration lives. He may or not cheer himself during 
these frequently repeated performances by a guitar, but 
in so moist an atmosphere the guitar strings would dis- 
course feeble music. 

Despite her earthquakes, and despite her damp and 
murky air, which depresses the traveller who had looked 
for brilliant sunshine, the City of the Kings retains that 
light-hearted gaiety and gift for social enjoyment for 
which she was famous in the old days. Not even po- 
litical disasters, nor revolutions more frequent than 
earthquakes, have dulled the edge of pleasure. There 
had been an attempted revolution shortly before my 



52 SOUTH AMERICA 

visit. The President, an excellent man, courageous 
and intelligent, had been suddenly seized by a band 
of insurgents, dragged through the streets, threat- 
ened with death unless he should abdicate, fired at, 
wounded and left for dead, until his own troops, 
having recovered from their surprise and found how 
few their assailants were, began to clear the streets 
of the revolutionaries, and discovered their chief under 
a heap of slain. The insurgent general fled over the 
frontier into Bolivia, where he was pointed out to me 
some weeks later, planning, as was believed, another 
descent upon Lima. Such events disturb the even 
tenor of Peruvian life little more than a street railway 
strike disturbs Philadelphia or Glasgow. 

Lima retains more of an old Spanish air than do the 
much larger capitals of the southern republics, Argen- 
tina, Chile, and Uruguay. Its viceregal court was long 
the centre of the best society of the Continent. Its 
archbishop was the greatest ecclesiastical potentate in 
the Southern Hemisphere. It had a closer connection 
with Spain through its leading families, as well as 
through official channels, than any other place. Loy- 
alty to the Spanish monarchy was strongest here. It 
was the last great city that held out for the Catholic 
King, long after all the other countries, both to the 
north and south, had followed the examples of revolt 
set by Mexico and Argentina. And it is also, with the 
exception of remote and isolated Bogota, where some 
few Spanish families are said to have kept their Euro- 
pean blood least touched by native immixture, the 



THE COAST OF PERU 53 

place in which the purest Castilian is spoken and the 
Castilian pride of birth is most cherished. 

That a city so ancient and famous should not have 
more of the past to shew, that the aspect of streets 
and buildings should not be more stately, that there 
should be so little of that flavour of romance which 
charms one in Spanish cities like Seville or Avila — 
these things might be expected in a centre of industry 
or commerce, losing its antique charm, like Ntirnberg 
or Venice, under the coarsening touch of material pros- 
perity. But there is here no growth of industry or 
commerce. The Limenos are not what a North Amer- 
ican would call either " progressive" or "aggressive." 
The railways and mines of Peru are mostly in the hands 
of men from the United States, shipping business in 
the hands of Englishmen and Germans, retail trade in 
those of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and others from con- 
tinental Europe. But the people of Lima may answer 
that there are more ways than one of being happy. 
They enjoy life in their own way, with more civil free- 
dom, and very much more religious freedom, than under 
the Viceroys, and occasional revolutions — now less 
sanguinary than they used to be — are better than a 
permanent rule of inquisitors and officials sent from 
Spain. Some day or other Lima will be drawn into the 
whirlpool of modern progress. But Europe and North 
America are still far off, and in the meantime the inhab- 
itants, with their pleasant, courteous manners and their 
enjoyment of the everyday pleasures of life, are willing 
enough to leave mines and commerce to the foreigner. 



54 SOUTH AMERICA 

From Callao it is two days more on to Mollendo, 
over a cold, grey, tumbling sea, along a brown and 
cloud-shadowed coast. We had, however, changed into 
a much larger steamer, for at Callao begins the through 
ocean service all the way to Liverpool of the Pacific 
Steam Navigation Company. Their vessels, not so 
large nor so luxuriously fitted up as the Atlantic liners 
that ply between Europe and New York, are excellent 
sea boats, and commanded by careful British captains. 

Next to Callao in its importance as a Peruvian port, 
is the little town of Mollendo, for from it starts the prin- 
cipal railway in the country, that called the Southern 
of Peru, which climbs the Andes, traverses the central 
plateau, and sends out branches to Cuzco on the north, 
and on the southeast to the frontier of Bolivia, on the 
shore of Lake Titicaca. It is the main avenue to the 
interior of the country. Unfortunately there is at 
Mollendo no harbour, only an open roadstead, where 
vessels He rolling and pitching in the ocean swell, 
which is sometimes heavy enough to make landing in 
boats difficult or even dangerous. A sort of break- 
water has been made enclosing a tiny port, but even 
in its shelter, the sweep of the great billow round the 
rocky semicircle forces the disembarking passenger to 
jump hastily ashore and scurry up before the next bil- 
low overtakes him. No more dreary spot than this 
could be imagined. Payta in its desert was doleful 
enough, but Payta had sun; and this place, under a 
thick roof of cloud, was far more gloomy. Hills brown 
and barren rise steeply from the beach, leaving little 



THE COAST OF PERU 55 

room for the few houses, brown as the cliff itself. 
There is not a blade of grass visible, nor a drop of 
fresh water within many miles, save what a pipe brings 
from a distant river. Yet, gloomy as the place looked 
under the grey cloud roof which was hanging over 
land and sea, the inhabitants find it more tolerable 
at this season than such an arid and treeless land be- 
comes when the blaze of the sun is reflected from the 
rocky hill face behind. 

The railroad runs south for some miles between 
the cliffs along a stretch of sand, on which the surf booms 
in slow thunder, then leaves the shore and turns up 
into the clouds, mounting in long zigzags the steep 
acclivities of the mountain, and following here and there 
what were hardly to be called glens, but rather water- 
less hollows, down which once in nine or ten years a 
rain storm may send a torrent. The mists grow 
thicker and damper as one rises, and with the cooler 
and damper air there begins to be a little vegetation, 
some flowers, most of them at this season withered, 
and low, thorny shrubs, such as are usually found on 
arid soils. Away off to the south, occasional glimpses 
are caught of a river valley far below, where the bright 
green and yellow of crops on the irrigated banks make 
a pleasant relief to the monotony of the brown or 
black slopes, up which we keep our way. Curiosity 
grows more intense to know what lies behind those 
dreary mountains. At last, after two hours of steady 
climbing to a height of over four thousand feet, the 
train reaches what seems to be the top of the range, 



56 SOUTH AMERICA 

but proves to be really the edge of a tableland, as 
it emerges on to level ground, it suddenly passes 
out of the mists into dazzling sunshine, and stops 
at a spot called Cachendo. We step out, and have 
before us a view, the like of which we had never seen 
before. In front, looking eastward, was a wide plain 
of sand and pebbles with loose piles and shattered 
ridges of black rock rising here and there from its 
surface, all shimmering in the sunlight. Beyond the 
plain, thirty miles away, is a long line of red and grey 
mountains, their sides all bare, their crags pierced by 
deep, dark gorges, so that they seem full of shadows. 
Behind these mountains again, and some fifty or sixty 
miles distant, three gigantic mountains stand up and 
close the prospect. That farthest to the south is a 
long line of precipices, crowned here and there by spires 
and towers of rock, seventeen thousand feet in height. 
This is Pichu Pichu. Its faces are too steep for snow, 
save in the gorges that scar them here and there, but 
lower down, where the slopes are less abrupt, every 
gully is white with desert sand blown up by the winds. 
Next to the north is a huge purplish black cone, 
streaked near its top with snow beds, and lower down 
by lines of red or grey ash and black lava. This is 
El Misti, a volcano not quite extinct, for though 
there has been no eruption for centuries, faint curls 
of steam still rise from the crater. It stands quite 
alone, evidently of far more recent origin than the 
third great mass, its neighbour on the north, Chachani, 
which, though also of volcanic rock, has long since lost 



THE COAST OF PERU 57 

its crater, and rises in three great black pinnacles, 
divided by valleys filled with snow. Both it and Misti 
exceed nineteen thousand feet. They are not, however, 
the loftiest ground visible. Far, far away to the north, 
there tower up two white giants, Ampato, and (farther 
west) the still grander Coropuna, whose height, not yet 
absolutely determined, may exceed twenty-two thou- 
sand feet and make it the rival of Illampu in Bolivia 
and Aconcagua in Chile. It stands alone in a vast 
wilderness, a flat-topped cone at the end of a long 
ridge, based on mighty buttresses all deep with snow 
and fringed with glaciers. 1 These five mountains belong 
to the line of the great Western Cordillera which runs, 
apparently along the line of a volcanic fissure, all the 
way north to Ecuador and Colombia. 

This was our first view of the Andes, a view to which 
few parts of the Old World furnish anything similar, 
for nowhere else, except in Iceland, and in Tibet and 
Turkistan, do snow mountains rise out of waterless 
deserts. Yet this contrast was only a part of the 
strange weirdness of the landscape, a landscape unlike 
Alps or Pyrenees or Apennines, unlike the Caucasus or the 
Himalaya, unlike the Rocky Mountains and Sierra 
Nevada of North America. The foreground of wan- 
dering sand and black stones, the sense of solitude and of 
boundless space, a space useless to man and a solitude 

1 Since our visit Coropuna has been ascended by my friend Pro- 
fessor Hiram Bingham of Yale University (U.S.A.). The average 
of his observations gives it a height of 21,700 feet. A very interest- 
ing account of his long and difficult snow climb may be found in 
Harper's Magazine for March, 1912. 



58 SOUTH AMERICA 

he can never people, the grimness of these bare walls of 
rock and pinnacles of untrodden snow rising out of a 
land with neither house nor field nor flower nor animal 
life, but only two lines of steel running across the desert 
floor, would have been terrible were it not for the ex- 
quisite richness and variety of the colours. In the fore- 
ground the black rocks and the myriad glitter of sand 
crystals were sharp and clear. The tints were more deli- 
cate on the red hills beyond, and the stern severity of 
the precipices in the far background was softened into 
tenderness by distance. The sunlight that burned upon 
these lines of iron and danced in waves of heat upon the 
rocks, seemed to bring out on all the nearer hills and 
all the distant crags varieties of hue, sometimes con- 
trasted, sometimes blending into one another, for which 
one could find no names, for pink melted into lilac and 
violet into purple. Two months later, in the forests 
of Brazil, we were to see what the sun of the tropics 
does in stimulating an exuberant life : here we saw what 
beauty he can give to sterility. 

This "Pampa, " or flat stretch of ground over which 
the railroad runs, is the first step eastward and upward 
from the sea on to the great inner plateau of Peru, 
and has a height of from four to five or six thou- 
sand feet. Its surface is generally level, yet broken 
by ridges and hummocks of rock, and dotted all over by 
mounds of fine grey or brownish sand composed of mi- 
nute shining crystals. These sand hills, called medanos, 
are mostly crescent shaped, much like the moon in its 
first quarter, steep on the convex side, and from ten 



THE COAST OF PERU 59 

to fifteen or even twenty feet high. They drift from 
place to place under the south wind, which blows 
strongly and steadily during the heat of the day, the 
convex of the crescent always facing the wind. Some- 
times they are swept on to and block the railway 
line; and when this is apprehended large stones are 
heaped up at the convex of the crescent and the move- 
ment is thus arrested or the sand dissipated. Such 
scanty vegetation as we had seen on the mist-covered 
hills toward the coast, has here quite disappeared under 
the fiery sun, — not even a cactus lifts its stiff stem. It 
is all sand and rocks, till the line, having run for some 
twenty miles across the Pampa, enters and begins to 
climb the second stairway of mountains to another 
and higher level, which forms the second terrace 
over which the way lies to the central plateau. The 
stairway is that line of red and grey mountains which 
were described as filling the middle distance in the 
view from Cachendo. Winding up through their hollows 
and along their faces the train enters a deep gorge or 
canyon, at the bottom of which, between vertical rock 
walls, is seen a foaming stream, and mounts along a ledge 
cut out in the side of the gorge. The canyon widens a 
little, and at its bottom are seen bright green patches of 
alfalfa, cultivated with patient toil by the Indians who 
water them by tiny rills drawn from the stream. At 
last the line emerges on open and nearly level ground. 
One has mounted the second step and reached the 
second terrace or shelf of the Peruvian tableland. 
Here on a gently rising slope, in a grand amphitheatre, 



60 SOUTH AMERICA 

the northeastern and eastern and southeastern sides o! 
which are formed by the three great peaks, Chachani, 
El Misti, and Pichu Pichu stands Arequipa, the second 
city in Peru. 

It is built on a gentle slope, on both sides of the river 
Chile, a torrent descending from distant snows in a 
broad, shallow and stony bed, and indeed owes its exist- 
ence to this river, for it was the presence of water, 
enabling a little oasis in the desert to be cultivated, 
that caught the military eye of Francisco Pizarro. 
Discerning the need for a Spanish stronghold between 
the interior tableland and the coast, he chose this 
spot by the river at the foot of the pass that gives the 
easiest access to that tableland. It had already been a 
rest-house station, as its Quichua name implies, on one of 
the Inca tracks from Cuzco to the sea, along which a ser- 
vice of swift Indian runners is said to have been main- 
tained by the Incas and to have carried up fresh fish to 
the monarch at Cuzco. It became the seat of a bishop, 
was soon well stocked with churches and convents, and 
has ever since held its head high, proud of its old fami- 
lies, and having escaped that occupation by the victori- 
ous Chilean army to which Lima succumbed. The air 
has the desert quality of purity and invigorating fresh- 
ness. Although thin, for the height above the sea is 
over seven thousand feet, 1 it is not thin enough to affect 
the heart or lungs of most persons in ordinary health. 
The sun's heat is great and there is plenty of it, 
for here one is quite above the region of sea mists, 
1 The Harvard Observatory Report gives it as 7550. 



THE COAST OF PERU 61 

but there is so little to do that no one needs to work in 
the hot hours, and for the matter of that, nobody, 
except the Indians, and the clerks of a few European 
firms, works at all. The nights are deliciously cool. 
Plenty of water for fields and gardens and fountains 
can be drawn from the river, and if the municipal au- 
thorities took pains to clean up the city by removing 
rubbish, and set themselves to make the outskirts neater 
and plant more trees, nothing would be wanting to render 
Arequipa, so far as externals go, a delightful place of 
residence. The clearness of the air has led to its being 
selected as the site of an astronomical observatory 
maintained by Harvard University for mapping out 
the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Not even in 
Egypt or in the deserts of South Africa do the constella- 
tions shine with a more brilliant lustre. The Harvard 
observers placed and for a time maintained two mete- 
orological stations on El Misti, one near the top, at a 
height of 19,200 feet, another at a point they called 
Mont Blanc (15,700 feet). Those who know how re- 
cent is the love of mountain climbing in Europe will 
be interested in hearing that the volcano was ascended 
as far back as a.d. 1677, on which occasion the crater 
was exorcised and sacred relics cast into it. The ob- 
servers also constructed a mule path to the summit, for 
though the face turned to Arequipa is steep, there is no 
difficulty in ascending from the north by a circuitous 
track. There are two craters, a newer one with a 
diameter of 1500 feet inside a larger one, whose diameter 
is 2800 feet. I could find no record of any eruption 



62 SOUTH AMERICA 

of lava or ashes since the Spanish Conquest, but the 
vapours in the new crater, always thick, sometimes in- 
crease sufficiently to alarm the Arequipefios. 

The line of perpetual snow is extremely high in this 
dry region, as it is in the equally dry peaks of northern 
Chile. On some mountains of 19,000 feet the snow dis- 
appears in summer, except in sunless hollows. 

I found myself wondering whether the fascination of 
che city, with views out over the furrowed desert 
to the west, where the sun goes down into the cloud 
bank that hangs over the Pacific, and views up to the 
tall peaks that guard it to the east, would retain its 
power when it had grown familiar, and wondering, 
also, whether, through the four centuries since Euro- 
peans came to dwell here, there were many who drew 
delight from the marvellous nature that surrounds 
it, and found in the contemplation of this extraordi- 
nary scenery some relief from the monotony of life 
in a society so small and so isolated. The three 
great mountain masses that tower over the city, em- 
blems of solid and unchanging strength in their form, 
are always changing in their aspect. The snows creep 
down in the season of rains, and ascend again when the 
time of drought returns. Sunrise and sunset bring 
perpetual miracles of loveliness in the varying play 
of colours upon snow and rocks. Pichu Pichu, with its 
long, grey line of precipices, glows under the western 
sun in every tint of pink and crimson. Chachani's 
black pinnacles turn to a dark violet, while the snows 
between them redden. In the middle the broad-based 



THE COAST OF PERU 63 

cone of El Misti, with its dark lava flows and beds of 
brown or yellow ash, ranges from glowing orange to a 
purple deep as if the mountain were all colour to its 
core. Behind it, when twilight comes, there rises to 
the zenith a pale bank of pearly grey, faintly touched 
by the light that is dying in the west. No wonder that 
this solemn and majestic summit, traditions of whose 
outbursts of fire in days gone by still survive, has been 
personified and worshipped by the Indians, who, though 
nominally Christians, have, like other primitive races, 
retained a great deal of the ancient nature religion 
which sees spirits in all remarkable objects. The 
reverence for the mountain deities still lingers in secret 
among them, though it seldom takes form in sacrifices 
like those of the olden time, when, as tradition says, 
youths and maidens were flung into the crater to appease 
the wrath of the fire spirit. A Jesuit annalist relates 
how, in a.d. 1600, when the volcano of Ornate, farther 
to the southeast, was in violent eruption, casting forth 
showers of ashes which fell round Arequipa, darkening 
the sky, while a glow of lurid light shone from the dis- 
tant crater, the Indian wizards robed themselves in 
red and offered to Ornate sacrifices of sheep and fowls, 
beseeching the mountain not to overwhelm them. 
Then he adds, "These wizards told the Indians that 
they talked to the Devil, who told them of the approach- 
ing catastrophe, and said that Ornate had asked El Misti 
to join him in destroying all the Spaniards. But El Misti 
answered that he could not help Ornate, because he had 
been made a Christian and had received the name of 



64 SOUTH AMERICA 

San Francisco; so Ornate was obliged to undertake the 
work alone." x 

Built far more solidly than Lima, with house walls 
five or six feet thick, and lying more out of the stream 
of modernizing conditions, Arequipa has retained an 
air of antiquity, and, it may be said, of dignity, 
superior to that of the capital. As one looks north- 
eastward from the lower part of the town up the ris- 
ing ground, the numerous churches, with here and there 
a tall conventual pile, make a varied and effective 
skyline. The gardens on the higher northwestern bank 
of the river relieve the mass of houses, and the yellow- 
ish grey volcanic stone of which they are built, mel- 
lowed by the strong sun, shews well against the purple 
mass of Misti. There are some picturesque street 
vistas too, but one misses the bright colours of peasant 
dress which a city of Old Spain or Italy would shew. 
The women are largely in black. The black manta 
drawn over the head is absolutely prescribed for 
church; indeed, even a European visitor is not al- 
lowed to enter a church anywhere in these countries in 
hat or toque; she must cover her head with the manta. 

The houses are low, for here, too, earthquakes are 
dreaded, and the streets roughly paved with large 
cobblestones of hard, smooth lava. Streams of water 
drawn from the river run down many of them, and 
other streams water the fields along the outskirts. 

1 Quoted in the learned notes to Mr. Bandelier's valuable book, 
Islands of Titicaca and Koati, p. 161, from a MS. in the National 
Archives at Lima. Ornate is probably the volcano now usually 
known as Ubinas. 



THE COAST OF PERU 65 

Here and there one sees a garden planted with dark 
green trees, which relieve the glare of light. The 
Plaza, less ample than that of Lima, is hardly less 
striking, with the great pile of the Cathedral occupying 
more than half of one side of it, arcades filled with 
shops bordering the other three sides, flowers and shrubs 
planted in the middle. Everything reminds one of the 
Asiatic or North African East, — the long, low, blank 
house walls which enclose the streets, walls into which 
few and small windows open, because the living rooms 
look into a central yard or patio; the concentration of 
the better sort of shops in arcades which represent the 
Eastern bazaar ; the flat roofs on which people sit in 
the evenings ; the deep and pungent dust ; the absence 
of wheeled vehicles ; for everybody rides, the richer on 
horses and the rest of the world on donkeys ; the scantily 
dressed Indians, wild looking as Bedaween, though 
with reddish brown instead of yellowish brown skins. 
Instead of camels there are llamas, the one native beast 
of burden in Peru, much smaller than the camel and 
more handsome, but not unlike it in its large lustrous 
eyes, and in the poise of its long neck, with the small 
erect head slightly thrown back. It resembles the 
camel also in its firm resolve not to move except at 
its own fixed pace, and to bear no load heavier than 
that (of one hundred pounds) to which it is accustomed. 
The brilliant light, too, and the dry, keen air are like 
the fight and air of the East. But no Eastern city has 
around it a mountain landscape like this. One must 
place Tunis or Trebizond in the valley of Zermatt to 



66 SOUTH AMERICA 

get an impression of Arequipa as it stands, encircled by 
snow fields and majestic towers of rock. 

The Oriental quality, which startles one in these 
Spanish-American cities of the Far West is perhaps 
not wholly due to the Moorish influences transmitted 
through their Spanish colonists. Climatic and social con- 
ditions resembling those of northern Africa and southern 
Spain have counted for a good deal. Sunlight and 
dryness prescribe certain ways of building, and the 
Peruvian Indian resembles the Arab or the Moor in 
his indifference to cleanliness and comfort. Here in 
Arequipa, one begins to realize that Peru is in respect 
of population still essentially a land of the aborigines. 
All the lower kinds of work are done by Indians, and 
the class next above is at least half Indian in blood, 
though not readily distinguishable from the man of Span- 
ish stock, either in aspect or in character and manners. 
The negro who still abounds at Lima and Callao, though 
he is beginning to be absorbed into the mass of whites, 
is no longer seen at Arequipa, for he cannot stand this 
cold, thin, highland air ; and even the zambo, a half- 
breed of Indian and negro, who is said to want the best 
qualities of both races, is a trifling element. Here and 
elsewhere in South America it is impossible to determine 
the proportion of perfectly pure Spanish families to the 
whole population. Probably it is small, not five per 
cent over the whole country, but in Arequipa it may 
be much larger. 

In one respect the city, while thoroughly Spanish, 
is very unlike the East. It is, and always has been, 



THE COAST OF PERU 67 

steeped in ecclesiasticism. The Cathedral is a long 
and handsome pile, rebuilt after the earthquake of 
1868, with two towers on its south front, and an un- 
usually spacious and unadorned interior. It contains 
a picture attributed to Van Dyck. There is one 
other church of special interest, that called the " Com- 
pania," i.e. church of the Company of Jesus. Every- 
where in South America the Jesuits were numerous, 
wealthy, and powerful till their suppression in the middle 
of the eighteenth century ; and here, as in many Italian 
and Spanish towns, their churches are the most pro- 
fusely decorated without and within. The north 
facade of this one, built of reddish grey sandstone, is a 
wonderfully rich and finely wrought piece of ornamen- 
tation, and the seventeenth century pictures and wood 
carvings of the interior are curious if not beautiful 
specimens of the taste of the time. There are scores 
of other churches and convents, far more than suffi- 
cient for a city of thirty-five thousand people. Their 
bells clang all day long, and clerical costumes are 
everywhere in the streets. What is still more remark- 
able, the men, as well as the women, are practising 
Catholics, and attend church regularly, a rare thing in 
most parts of Spanish America. The city was always 
an ecclesiastical stronghold, and during the long War 
of Independence, was accounted the most conservative 
place in Peru. Indeed, it is so still. 

But if Arequipa seems old-fashioned and conservative 
to-day, when a railway connecting it with the coast 
brings it within three days of Lima, what must it have 



68 SOUTH AMERICA 

been two centuries ago, when probably one-third of the 
white population consisted of priests, monks, and nuns, 
and the Church ruled unquestioned ? 

One can imagine no spot more absolutely cut off 
than this was from the world outside. It was an oasis 
like Tadmor in the wilderness. Three days' journey 
across desolate wastes lay between it and the coast, a 
coast itself scarcely inhabited, and behind towards 
the north and east there were only mountain solitudes, 
over which pastoral Indians roved. The bishop and 
the head of the Jesuits were the real powers, even the 
governor, and beneath him the alcalde, bowing to 
them. Nowhere in the world to-day could one find 
anything like that uniformity of opinion and custom 
which reigned in this little, remote city in those colo- 
nial days which came down into the days of Hume and 
Bentham in England, of Voltaire and Rousseau in France, 
and indeed down almost to the memory of men still 
living. The vision of the Holy Office in the background 
at Lima was hardly needed to enforce absolute submis- 
sion of word and thought in such a society. The traveller 
of to-day marvels at the stillness and stagnation of one 
of the smaller cities in the interior of Old Spain. Yet a 
Spanish city, however small or remote, is at least in 
Europe: there are other cities not far off, and men 
come and go. Here there were no breaks in the mo- 
notony of life, nothing but local interests of the most 
trivial sort to occupy men's minds. The only events 
were feast days and religious processions, with now 
and then an earthquake, and once, thirty years before 



THE COAST OF PERU 69 

the War of Independence, the terror of an Indian in- 
surrection far up in the plateau. 

Yet life was not wholly monastic. There was some 
learning, mostly theological. There was also a good deal 
of verse making : Arequipa was even famous for its 
poets. Upon what themes did their Muse employ 
itself ? What sighs were there from nuns behind the 
convent walls ? What sort of a human being was the 
bishop who walked in solemn processions behind 
chanting choristers to and from his Cathedral ? Must 
there not have been even here the perpetual play of 
human passion, and could any weight of conservatism 
and convention extinguish the possibilities of romance ? 
I heard from a trustworthy source a story which shews 
that even in grave and rigid Arequipa love would have 
its way and that the hearts of stately ecclesiastics 
could melt in pity. I tell it in my informant's words. 

In old colonial days there lived in Arequipa a power- 
ful family owning large estates and rich mines which 
they had inherited from their ancestors among the 
Conquistadores. They wielded authority both in 
Church and State. At the time when the incident to be 
described happened the heads of the family were two 
brothers, of whom the elder held the landed property and 
the younger was bishop and ruled the Church. The 
elder was a widower with two children, a son and a 
daughter. The great convent of Nuestra Senora de los 
Dolores, founded and richly endowed by this family, 
always had one of its members as its Abbess, and at that 
time the only sister of these two brothers held the post. 



70 SOUTH AMERICA 

The family, being a power in Arequipa, sought to 
preserve their supremacy, and accordingly decided 
that the young daughter of the elder brother should 
enter the convent and eventually succeed her aunt as 
Abbess, while her brother should marry and inherit the 
estates. The girl had no vocation for a religious life 
and rebelled against the fate proposed for her, but the 
father and uncle were inexorable, and after a vain 
struggle she was forced to yield and take the veil. 
Her aunt felt sympathy for the poor child, having 
perhaps passed through a like experience herself, and 
she made the young sister's religious duties as light as 
possible, allowing her to lead the choir, as she possessed 
a fine voice, and giving her the business of the convent 
to attend to. Embroidery was one of the occupations 
of the nuns, especially fine work on linen, the designs 
for which were brought from Spain; and to supervise 
this work and to take care of it was one of the girl's 
chief pleasures. She always despatched it to the 
laundry herself and received it on its return, laying it 
carefully in the presses perfumed with jasmine flowers, 
and the laundress was the only person from the outside 
world (except her own family) with whom she had any 
communications. This laundress happened to be an 
alert and intelligent woman, and she gave the nun all 
the news she had of the world outside the convent walls. 
After the young sister had been about five years in the 
convent the Abbess fell ill, and all the old-fashioned 
remedies known to the nuns failed to help her. She 
grew steadily worse and they were beginning to think of 



THE COAST OF PERU 71 

administering the last offices of the Church when the 
laundress suggested to the niece of the Abbess that the 
clever Scotch physician who had lately come to Arequipa 
should be consulted. To consult a man and a heretic 
horrified the nuns, but the laundress pressed her advice, 
and finally the bishop was appealed to and was in- 
duced, since his sister's life was at stake, to give his 
consent. The patient, however., even then refused to 
see the doctor in person, but the niece, closely veiled, 
was to be allowed to have an interview with him and to 
describe the symptoms. Although the doctor was aware 
that an opinion given under such circumstances was of 
little use, he consented to this arrangement. Accord- 
ingly, at the appointed time he presented himself at 
the convent gate, under the guidance of the laundress, 
and was taken to the antechamber of the Abbess's apart- 
ment, for a lady of such high rank as the Abbess did not 
occupy a cell. There the niece received him, closely 
veiled, and described her aunt's condition. On his 
asking her if she could count the pulse, she replied, 
"No, I have never tried." "If you will place your 
fingers on my wrist, I will teach you," he said. Timidly 
she did as he bade her, and counted the beats; and, 
thrilled as he was by the musical softness of her voice, 
it is possible that he prolonged the lesson, for at length 
she said, "I understand perfectly, and will now go and 
count my aunt's pulse," and returned presently with a 
written report. During her absence the doctor had 
made enquiries of the laundress in regard to the Abbess's 
symptoms, and had decided that the old lady was suffer- 



72 SOUTH AMERICA 

ing from cancer and had not long to live. But the 
young sister had made too profound an impression on 
him to let him give up the case at once, and he pre- 
scribed some soothing remedies and offered to return 
in the morning. These visits continued for several days, 
and at last he succeeded in seeing the sister's beauti- 
ful face and counting her pulse. The laundress could 
not always be in attendance, and the narcotics adminis- 
tered to the Abbess dulled her vigilance. Realising that 
his patient's days were numbered and that his work 
would soon be over, he saw there was no time to lose. 
The scruples of the young sister were finally overcome. 
Love won the day, and she promised to fly with her 
lover after the death of her aunt. With the help of 
the laundress he devised a plan for escape. The con- 
vent was built of stone and the sisters' cells were solidly 
arched like casemates, the only wood about them being 
the doors. Obtaining a skeleton from the hospital, 
the doctor took it to the house of the laundress and she 
conveyed it in a large linen basket to the convent the 
day after the funeral of the Abbess, and concealed it in 
the young sister's bed. That night the girl set fire to her 
bed, and in the confusion occasioned by the smoke and 
the alarm she escaped unnoticed into the street, where the 
laundress awaited her and took her to her house. The 
frightened nuns sought for her in vain, and when 
finally a few charred bones were found in her cell, which 
they imagined in their ignorance to be hers, they mourned 
her as dead, and buried the bones with all the honour 
due to her rank and station. Meanwhile the girl 



THE COAST OF PERU 73 

herself was in great danger, foi* had she been discovered 
she would have been tried for faithlessness to her vows, 
and she shuddered at the bare possibility of the old 
punishment of being walled up alive. It was impos- 
sible to stay long in the laundress's house, and the 
doctor implored her to fly with him to the coast, 
an arduous ride of seventy miles over the desert. 
Recoiling from such a step, she insisted on first trying 
to win the pardon and protection of her relatives, 
and she resolved to throw herself on the mercy of her 
uncle, the bishop, who had always shewn her much 
affection and was all-powerful with the rest of the 
family. Accordingly, just after twilight, and wrapped 
in her manta, which concealed her face and figure, she 
stole into the bishop's palace, where she found her uncle 
at evening prayer, and throwing herself on her knees 
before him, she implored his protection. He took her 
at first for her own ghost (for had he not performed the 
funeral service over her remains?), and when he dis- 
covered that it was really she, in flesh and blood, he was 
horrified and put her from him as he would a viper. 
But as she still clung to him, telling him her story and 
imploring his mercy and protection, he at last listened 
to her, and finally said, "wait a moment," and left the 
room, returning shortly with a bag containing money and 
family jewels, emeralds, which he thrust into her hand. 
"Take this," he whispered, "and fly with your lover to 
the coast. I will see that you are not followed." She 
found the doctor with horses at the city gate, and they 
rode away across the desert, never stopping except to 



74 SOUTH AMERICA 

change their mounts and to eat a little food, until thej 
reached the coast, where by an extraordinary piece of 
luck they found an English frigate lying at anchor. 
Hurrying on board they told the captain their story, 
and he at once summoned the chaplain, who married 
them, and they were soon on their way to England. 

Time passed, and the South American colonies be- 
came independent of Spain. Many years later, the 
brother of the nun went on a public mission to Europe. 
Before he left Peru his uncle, the bishop, told him the 
story of his sister's life, which had been kept secret 
until then, and after telling him where she was to be 
found (for through the Church he had watched over 
her), he desired her brother to communicate with her. 
This the nephew did in due course, and his sister was 
finally forgiven, and her descendants recognized and 
received by their Peruvian relatives. One of these 
descendants was seen by my informant wearing the 
emeralds that had been in the bishop's bag. 



CHAPTER III 

CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 

None of the countries of South America, except Chile, 
has been demarcated by Nature from its neighbour; 
it is to historical events that they owe their present 
boundaries. This is eminently true of Peru, which is, 
save on her ocean side, marked off from the adjoining 
countries neither by river line nor by mountain line 
nor by desert. Her territory includes regions naturally 
very dissimilar, about each of which it is proper to 
say a few words here. 

The western strip, bordering on the Andes and the 
Pacific, is nearly all pure desert, sterile and unin- 
habited, except where those river-valleys referred to 
in the last chapter descend to the sea. The eastern 
part, lying on the farther side of the Andes, and called 
by the people the Montana, subsides from the moun- 
tains into an immense alluvial plain and is covered 
by a tropical forest, thick and trackless, unhealthy for 
Europeans, and inhabited, except where a few trading 
towns have been built on the rivers, only by Indian 
tribes, none of them much above savagery, and many 
still heathen. It is a region most of which was until 
lately virtually unexplored and thought not worth ex- 
ploring. Within recent years, however, the demand 
for india rubber has brought in the agents of various 
trading companies, who have established camps and 

75 



76 SOUTH AMERICA 

stations wherever the rivers give access to the forests 
and send the rubber down the Amazon to be shipped 
to Europe and North America. The harmless and 
timid Indians have in some places been seized and 
forced to work as slaves by ruffians supplying rub- 
ber to these companies, wretches apparently of mixed 
Spanish and native blood, who have been embold- 
ened by the impunity which remoteness from regular 
governmental control promises to perpetrate hid- 
eous cruelties upon their helpless victims. It is a coun- 
try of amazing natural wealth, for the spurs of the 
Andean range are full of minerals; there are superb 
timber trees in the forests, and the soil, wherever the 
trees and luxuriant undergrowths have been cleared off 
from it, has proved extremely fertile, fit for the growth 
of nearly every tropical product. Eastern Peru is phys- 
ically a part, and not the largest part, of an immense 
region which includes the easternmost districts of Co- 
lombia and Ecuador upon the north and of Bolivia 
on the south, as well as a still larger area in western 
Brazil over which the same climatic conditions, pre- 
vail — great heat and great humidity producing a vege- 
tation so prolific that it is hard for man to hold his own 
against the forces of nature. This is indeed the reason 
why these tracts have been left until now a wilderness, 
suffering from the superabundance of that moisture, 
the want of which has made a wilderness of the lands 
along the Pacific coast. To this region, however, and 
to its future I shall return in a later chapter, 1 and men- 
1 Chapter XVI. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 77 

tion it here only because it is politically a part, and 
may hereafter become the most productive part, of the 
Peruvian Republic. The real Peru, the Peru of the 
ancient Indian civilization and of the Spanish colonial 
Empire, is the central region which lies along the Andes 
between these thinly settled, far eastern forests and the 
barren deserts of the Pacific coast. 

Central Peru is altogether a mountain land, and is 
accordingly called by the people "the Sierra." It is 
traversed by two (more or less parallel) ranges of the 
Andes, the eastern and the western Cordilleras, which 
with their spurs and their branching ridges cover a 
large part of its area. It includes what is called the 
Puno, a comparatively level plateau, some seventy to 
one hundred miles wide and enclosed by these two main 
lines of the Cordilleras. Between the main ranges and 
their branches, there lie deep valleys formed by the 
courses of the four or five great rivers which, flowing 
in a northwesterly or northeasterly direction and ulti- 
mately turning eastward, unite to form the mighty 
Amazon. This Sierra region is, roughly speaking, about 
three hundred miles long (from northwest to southeast) 
and one to two hundred miles wide ; but of this area 
only a small part is fit for settled human habitation. 
The average height of the plateau is from ten thou- 
sand to thirteen thousand feet above sea level, and that 
of the region fit for pasture on the slopes and tops of 
the ridges from ten thousand to fourteen thousand 
feet — the snow line varying from fifteen to nineteen 
thousand. As these slopes give pasture to llamas and 



78 SOUTH AMERICA 

alpacas and sheep, and in some favoured places to 
cattle, so in the less arid and less sandy tracts of the 
plateau there is some tillage. But the parts best suited 
for agriculture are to be found in the valleys, especially 
in so much of them as lies between ten thousand and 
four thousand feet above sea-level, for below five thou- 
sand feet their conditions become tropical and resemble 
those of the Amazonian forests. In these valleys the 
soil, especially where it is volcanic, is extremely fertile, 
but many of them are so narrow and their declivi- 
ties so steep that cultivation is scarcely possible. 
No one accordingly who has studied the physical 
features of this country need be surprised to find that 
while the total area of Peru is about seven hundred 
thousand square miles, its population is estimated at 
only four million six hundred thousand. He may in- 
deed be more surprised at the accounts which Spanish 
historians almost contemporary with the Conquest 
give of the far larger population, perhaps ten millions, 
that existed in the days of the Incas. The great falling 
off, if those accounts be correct, is explicable partly 
by the slaughter perpetrated by the first Spaniards and 
the oppressions practised by their successors during 
nearly three centuries, partly by the fact that districts 
near the coast which the remains of irrigation works 
shew to have been formerly cultivated are now sterile 
for want of water. 

It was in the central highlands, at an altitude of 
from eight thousand feet and upwards that there arose 
such civilization as the ancient Peruvians developed: 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 79 

and its origin here rather than elsewhere in South 
America may be mainly due to favourable climatic 
conditions. There was enough rain to provide grass 
for animals and make tillage possible, and enough 
warmth to enable men to live in health, yet not enough 
either of rain or of heat to make nature too strong for 
man and to enfeeble man's capacities for work. 

Temperature and rainfall resembled generally those 
of the plateau of Mexico, a region somewhat lower, but 
farther from the Equator : and it was under simi- 
larly fortunate conditions of climate and agricultural 
possibilities that the races inhabiting those highlands 
had made, when Europeans arrived, some considerable 
advances in the arts of life. This central Peruvian 
area is to-day, with the exception of the irrigated banks 
of a few streams reaching the Pacific, the only part of 
the country where either an agricultural or a pastoral 
population can support itself. The rest of Peru depends 
upon its mines, chiefly of silver and copper, — a source 
of wealth uncertain at best. It is only in a few valleys, 
the most productive of which I am going to describe, 
that the agricultural population occupies any large con- 
tinuous area. As a rule each community is confined to 
its own valley and cut off from the others either by 
mountains or by high, bare ridges on which only sheep 
can be kept, most of them too high and bleak even for 
pasture. 1 

There is no better way of conveying some notion 

1 Paramo is the name applied to these bleak regions between the 
valleys. • 



80 SOUTH AMERICA 

of the character of this central region, the true Peru, 
than by describing the country through which I passed 
by railway from Arequipa eastward to Lake Titicaca 
and thence northward to Cuzco, the ancient Inca cap- 
ital. This railroad follows the line of the most impor- 
tant through route which war and commerce took in 
pre-Conquest times. It is the Southern Railroad of 
Peru, the main highway of the country. The section 
from Mollendo to the plateau at Juliaca was built 
many years ago, but the extension to Cuzco had been 
completed and opened less than a year before our visit. 
Both sections have been constructed by engineers from 
the United States, and the way in which the difficulties 
of extremely steep ascents and cuttings along precipitous 
slopes have been overcome reflects great credit on their 
skill. The gauge is the normal one. The line is owned 
by the Peruvian Corporation, a company registered 
in London, and under the energetic management of 
North American engineers it is doing a great deal to 
open up regions in which till some ten years ago there 
was not even a road fit for wheels. The passenger 
traffic is of course very small, and passenger trains run 
only once a day to Arequipa and thrice a week to 
Juliaca and Cuzco. 

Quitting Arequipa on the south-western side, the line 
winds up to the north and then to the east across a 
rugged and dreary region of rocky hill slopes, pierced 
by deep gorges through some of which brooks come 
down, fed by snow beds far above. It follows the line 
of a canyon, and wherever there is level ground at the 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 81 

bottom, some bright green strips of cultivation appear 
on the margin of the stream, with a few Indian huts ; 
so even these upper regions, cold and desolate as they 
are, are not so wholly desolate as the Pampa below. 
The view looking back over the city lying in its 
green oasis, with a stony desert all round, is superb. 
As we climb higher, the mass of Ampato and other 
giants of the western Cordillera deep with snow, 
rise in the northwest, while westward one sees be- 
yond the reddish grey mountains through which we 
had mounted to Arequipa from the desert Pampa, 
the gleaming sands of that desert, and behind them 
again, just on the horizon, the long, low bank of clouds 
that covers the Coast Range. Here at nine or ten 
thousand feet, one looks over the white upper sur- 
face of these clouds. Resting on the western edge of 
the Pampa, they stretch far out over the Pacific and 
veil it from sight. Thus steadily mounting, and seeing 
below in a ravine the hamlet of Yura, where is a min- 
eral spring whose pleasantly effervescent water is drunk 
all over Peru, the train winds round the northern flank 
of Chachani under its huge black precipices. Behind 
it and behind El Misti, which shews as a symmetrical 
cone on this side as well as on that turned towards 
Arequipa, we entered at a height of about eleven thou- 
sand feet a region typical of the Peruvian uplands. 
There was plenty of coarse grass, studded with alpine 
flowers, a few belonging to European genera. Llamas 
and alpacas were grazing on the slopes, herded by 
Indians : there were sheep, and a few cattle, and in 



82 SOUTH AMERICA 

one place we thought we caught sight among low bushes 
of a group of vicunas. This is a creature like the llama, 
but smaller, and useless as a beast of burden, because 
untameable. It roams over the hills between eleven 
thousand and fifteen thousand feet, and produces the 
finest of all the South American wools, of a delicate 
light brown tint, silky and soft as the fur of a chin- 
chilla. 

The scenery was strange and wild, not without a 
certain sombre grandeur. Below was the Chile River, 
the same which passes Arequipa, and to which we had 
returned after our circuit round Chachani. It was 
flowing in a deep channel which it had cut out for 
itself between walls of black lava : and the wide bare 
hollows beyond were filled with old lava streams and 
scattered ridges and piles of rock. To the southwest 
El Misti and his two mighty neighbours shut in the 
valley, and away to the south huge mountains, 
among them one conspicuous volcanic cone, were dimly 
seen, snowy summits mingled with the gathering clouds, 
for at this height rain and snow showers are frequent. 
The cone was probably Ubinas, the only active volcano 
in this neighbourhood, about sixteen thousand feet 
high. 

Still mounting to the eastward, the line rose over 
gentler slopes to a broad, bleak, and wind-swept ridge 
where tiny rivulets welling up out of pools in the 
yellowish grass were flowing west to the Pacific and 
eastward to the inland basin of Lake Titicaca. Large 
white birds like wild geese were fluttering over us. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 83 

Here were a few huts of the Indian shepherds near the 
buildings of the station ; and here a cross marked the 
Cumbre or top of the pass, which is called the Crucero 
Alto, 14,666 feet above sea level. Higher ground cut 
off the view to the north and clouds obscured the view to 
the east, but to the south we could discern some of the 
lofty summits of the western Cordillera on the watershed 
of which we stood. Thunderstorms were growling on 
both sides, and out of black clouds far in the northwest 
towards Coropuna came bright flashes of chain lightning. 
At this height the country is comparatively open and the 
valleys shallow, and this, along with the wonderful clear- 
ness of the air, enables the eye to range to a vast distance. 
This northwestern thunderstorm which we were watch- 
ing was possibly a hundred miles away. « We were awed 
by the mere vastness of the landscape, in which we 
looked over tracts it would take many days' journeys to 
traverse, and saw mountains eighteen thousand feet 
high separated by nameless valleys no one ever enters, 
with hills and rocks tumbled about in chaotic confusion, 
as though the work of world-shaping had here just be- 
gun. Stepping out into the bitter wind, we walked 
about awaiting signs of the Soroche or mountain sick- 
ness so much dreaded by Andean travellers, especially 
when they come straight up from the coast to this vast 
height, as high as the Matterhorn or the highest peaks 
of the Rocky Mountains. The air was very cold and 
very thin, seeming not to fill the lungs. But nothing 
happened. 

From the Crucero Alto the railway descends rapidly 



84 SOUTH AMERICA 

for two thousand feet past two large lakes, embosomed 
in steep green hills — they reminded me of Loch Garve 
in Ross-shire — till it reaches a wide, bare, desolate flat, 
evidently part of the former bed of Lake Titicaca, which 
was once far larger than it is to-day. Here we were in 
that central plateau which the people call the Puno and 
which surrounds the lake, its lower part cultivated and 
peopled. At the large village of Juliaca, whence a branch 
line runs to the port of Puno on the lake farther to the 
southeast, the main line turns off to the north, still over 
the flat land which, where not too marshy, is under til- 
lage. The inhabitants were all Indians, and only at 
Tirapata, which is a point of supply for the mines on the 
eastern slope of the mountains, were white people to be 
seen. Far to the northeast, perhaps one hundred miles 
away, could be discerned a serrated line of snowy moun- 
tains, part of the eastern Cordillera which divides the 
Titicaca basin from the Amazonian valleys. At last 
the hills begin to close in and the plain becomes a valley, 
narrowing as we travel farther north till, at a sharp 
bend in the valley which opens out a new landscape, 
we pass under a rock tower sixteen thousand feet 
high, like one of the aiguilles of Mont Blanc immensely 
magnified, and see in front of us a magnificent moun- 
tain mass streaming with glaciers. Two great peaks 
of from eighteen thousand to nineteen thousand feet are 
visible on this side, the easternmost one a long snow 
ridge resembling the Lyskamm above Zermatt ; and 
behind it there appears a still loftier one which may 
approach or exceed twenty thousand feet. This is 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 85 

the Sierra of Vilcanota, the central knot of the moun- 
tain system of Peru, as in it branches of the western 
inosculate with those of the eastern Cordillera. Though 
very steep, the highest peaks seemed to me, surveying 
them from a distance of fifteen or twenty miles, to offer 
no great difficulties to an active and experienced climber, 
apart of course from the rarity of the air at this immense 
height, a difficulty which, while negligible by many, is 
serious to some otherwise excellent mountaineers. The 
fact that the railroad passes close to these splendid 
summits gives unusual facilities for an assault on them, 
since the transportation of warm night coverings and of 
food is one of the chief difficulties in a cold and thinly 
peopled region. As none of the tops seems to have been 
yet scaled, they deserve the attention of aspiring alpin- 
ists. 

Above the village of Santa Rosa the valley is unin- 
habited, a deep, grassy hollow between the Vilcanota 
group of peaks on the east and a lower though lofty 
range on the west, with piles of stones at intervals, and 
now and then we met or passed a string of llamas carry- 
ing their loads, for the railway has not wholly super- 
seded the ancient modes of transportation. 

Just at the very highest point of the col or pass of 
La Raya 14,518 feet above sea-level, in which the valley 
ends, the westernmost of these Vilcanota peaks is visible 
on the east behind a deep gorge, the upper part of 
which is filled by a glacier. From this glacier there 
descends a torrent which on the level top of the pass 
spreads out into a small shallow marsh or lake which 



86 SOUTH AMERICA 

the Peruvians held sacred as the source of the sacred 
river Vilcamayu : and from this lake the water flows 
partly south into Lake Titicaca, partly north into the 
Amazon and the Atlantic. Here indeed we were looking 
upon one of the chief sources of that gigantic stream, for 
of all the rivers that join to make the Amazon this is 
among the longest. During its course till it meets the 
river Marafion, it is called first Vilcamayu, then Uru- 
bamba, and finally Ucayali. The pass itself, a broad 
smooth saddle not unlike, if one may compare great 
things with small, the glen and watershed between 
Dalnaspidal and Dalwhinnie which marks the summit 
level of the Highland Railway in Scotland, has no small 
historic interest, for it has been a highway for armies as 
well as for commerce from the remotest times. The an- 
cient track from Cuzco to the southern boundary of the 
Inca empire in Chile passed over it. By it the Spanish 
Conquistadores went backward and forward in their 
campaign of subjugation and in the fierce struggles 
among themselves which followed, nor was it less im- 
portant in the War of Independence a century ago. 
Till the railway was recently opened, thousands of 
llamas bearing goods traversed it every year. What 
one now sees is nothing more than a fairly well-beaten 
mule track, and I could neither discern any traces nor 
learn that traces have been discovered either of the wall 
which the Inca rulers are said to have built across it 
as a defence from the Collao tribes to the south, or of 
the paved road which, as the old writers say, they con- 
structed to connect Cuzco with the southern provinces. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 87 

Were such a spot in Switzerland or Tyrol, its lonely 
beauty would be broken by a summer hotel for health- 
seeking tourists ; nor could one imagine a keener and 
more delicious air than this, though people with weak 
hearts might find it trying. As soon as we had got a 
little way down from the top, the lungs began to feel 
easier, for the denser and warmer air of its lower 
levels comes up on the northerly wind which we met 
in descending. The valley, still smooth and grassy, 
sinks rapidly and in an hour or two we had entered 
a climate quite different from that of the Titicaca pla- 
teau to the south. After some six or eight miles a 
place is reached called Aguas Calientes (Hot Waters), 
from the numerous mineral springs which bubble up 
close together from the ground, most of them too hot 
to taste, and all impregnated with iron and sulphur. 
They are said to be valuable in various maladies, and 
in France or Switzerland an Etablissement des Bains 
would doubtless have arisen to enclose and exploit them. 
As it is, the only sign that they are used is a wooden 
hut erected over one of the springs in which the station 
master cures himself of rheumatism. There are only 
two houses besides the station, but on the hill above 
mines of copper and antimony are worked by Indian 
labour. 

Below this point the floor of the valley falls again. 
It is still narrow, but the now warmer climate permits 
tillage, and the patient toil of the Indians, turning every 
bit of ground to account, cultivates fields of grain and po- 
tatoes sloping at an angle so steep that ploughing or hoe- 



88 SOUTH AMERICA 

ing seems almost impossible. When one asks how 
this happens, the answer is that the rapacity of law- 
yers, ousting the Indian from the better lands below, 
drives him to these less productive slopes. The hill- 
sides are extraordinarily bare, but as fruit trees appear 
round the cottages, this may be due not to the altitude, 
but to the cutting down during many centuries of all 
other trees for fuel. Never have I seen an inhabited 
region — and in the case of this particular valley, a 
thickly inhabited region — so absolutely devoid of wood 
as is Peru. Even in Inca days, timber seems to have 
been very scarce. There is plenty to be had from the 
tropical forests lower down, but the cost of carrying 
logs up from them upon mule-back is practically pro- 
hibitive. A good, solid plank would be a load too 
heavy for a llama. 

Twenty miles below the pass of La Raya is the town 
of Sicuani, which we were fortunate enough to see on 
the market day — Sunday — when the Indians from 
many miles round come to sell and buy and enjoy them- 
selves. It is a good type of the well-to-do Peruvian 
village, the surrounding country being fertile and popu- 
lous. The better houses, a few of them two storied, are of 
stone, the rest of sun-dried mud — that adobe which one 
finds all over Spanish America from the pueblos of New 
Mexico down to Patagonia. Their fronts are covered 
with a wash of white or light blue, and this, with the 
red-tiled roofs, gives a pleasant freshness and warmth 
of tone. The two plazas whose joint area is about 
equal to half of the whole town, are thronged with 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 89 

Indians, all the men and many of the women wearing 
the characteristic poncho, a rough woollen or, less often, 
cotton cloak which comes below the waist, and is usu- 
ally of some bright hue. To this the women add gaudy 
petticoats, red or purplish, blue or green or violet, 
so that there is even more colour in the crowd than 
on the houses. The greatest variety is in the hats. 
The women wear round felts or cloth-covered straws, 
some almost as wide as a cardinal's ; many are square, 
set off by gilt or silvered bands like the academic 
cap of the English Universities, though the brim is 
larger. The man's hat is smaller ; it is mostly of stiff white 
felt, and underneath it is a tight fitting cloth cap of some 
bright colour, usually red, with flaps at each side to 
protect the ear and cheek from the piercing winds. 
Strings of glittering beads complete the Sunday dress 
of the women, and we saw only a few with silver orna- 
ments. Most of the trading seemed to be done by bar- 
ter, country folk exchanging farm or garden produce 
with the town dealers for groceries or cloth. The cotton 
cloths were largely made from the Peruvian plant culti- 
vated in the warm coast valleys, while some of the wool- 
len goods, such as blankets or stuff for petticoats, had 
come from England, as I saw on them the names of 
Yorkshire firms. Besides maize and nuts and peppers, 
together with oranges carried up from the hot valley of 
Urubamba seventy miles to the north, the most notice- 
able articles of commerce were a sort of edible seaweed 
brought from the coast, and dried marine star-fishes, 
and, above all, small bags of coca leaves, the article which 



90 SOUTH AMERICA 

is the one indispensable stimulant of the Indian, more 
for him than tea or coffee or alcoholic drinks are for the 
Asiatic or the European. It is a subtropical shrub or 
low tree which grows on the lower slopes of the Peruvian 
and Bolivian Andes and is sold to the Indians in small 
quantities, as indeed all the sales and purchases seemed 
to be on a small scale, there being among the peasants 
very little money though very little downright poverty. 
South American countries are, for the traveller at least, 
a land of high prices, but here we saw savoury messes 
of hot stewed meat with chopped onions and potatoes 
and a small glass of chicha (the common drink of the 
country brewed from maize), thrown in, offered at the 
price of five centavos, less than two English pence or 
a United States five cent piece. It was surprising 
that in so thick and busy a crowd there should be, 
instead of the chattering and clattering that one would 
have heard in Europe, only a steady hum. The Quichua 
Indians are a comparatively silent race, quiet and well 
mannered, and inoffensive except when they are drunk. 
These Sicuani people were small in stature, few ex- 
ceeding five feet six inches, their faces a reddish brown, 
the features regular though seldom handsome, for while 
the nose is often well formed, the mouth is ugly, with 
no fineness of line in the lips, although these are far less 
thick than a negro's. Some have a slight moustache, 
but beards are seen only on the mestizos (half breeds). 
Among the many diversities of feature which suggest 
that there has been an intermixture of races, perhaps 
long ago, there are two prevailing types — the broad, 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 91 

round, short face with full cheeks, and the longer face 
with an aquiline nose. All have dark brown or black 
eyes, and long, straight, black, rather coarse, hair, and 
in all there is a curiously stolid and impassive look as 
of men accustomed to centuries of monotony and sub- 
mission. Impassiveness is the characteristic note of 
the Indian. The Kafir is like a grown-up child; the 
Chinese have a curious quiet alertness and keenness of 
observation ; the Hindus (and most Orientals) are sub- 
missive though watchful as if trying to take the white 
man's measure : but the Indian is none of these things. 
In his obedience there is no servility : he is reserved, aloof, 
seemingly indifferent to the Viracocha 1 and to things 
in general. The most noticeable in the throng were 
the Indian village alcaldes, each carrying as the badge 
of his office a long, heavy staff or cane, with a spike at 
the bottom and a large round head, bound with silver 
bands and covered at the top with a silver casing. This 
dignitary, appointed by the local authority annually, 
exerts in his little community an undisputed sway, en- 
forced by his power of imprisonment. The post is eagerly 
sought, so that the wealthier sort will offer money to ob- 
tain it. We saw them moving through the crowd, all 
making way for them. There were, however, no dis- 
turbances to quell : the bright sun shone on an orderly 
and good-humoured crowd. Some groups, drawn a little 
apart, were enjoying the strains of a guitar or an ac- 

1 This is the term of respect by which an Indian usually addresses 
a white man of superior station. The word was in Inca mythology 
the name of a divine or half -divine hero — it was also the name of 
one of the Inca sovereigns. 



92 SOUTH AMERICA 

cordion or those of the true national instrument, the 
Pandean pipe made of hollow reeds unequal in length, 
while above, on the hillside, the donkeys on which the 
wealthier peasants had ridden in and the llamas that 
had carried their produce stood patiently awaiting the 
declining light that should turn them homeward. 

The only point of interest in Sicuani is the church 
and the arched gateway beside it. It is like any other 
village church, the architecture dull, the interior 
gloomy. But it was in this church that in 1782 Andres 
the nephew of Tupac Amaru, half of Spanish Biscayan, 
half of Inca blood, received episcopal absolution for his 
share in the great insurrection of the Indians under that 
chieftain, an absolution to be shortly followed by his mur- 
der at the hands of perfidious Spaniards; and it was on 
this arch (if the story we heard be true) that some of the 
limbs of the unfortunate Tupac Amaru himself were 
exposed after he had been torn in pieces by four horses 
in the great square of Cuzco. 

The valley of the Vilcamayu River below Sicuani 
unfolds scene after scene of varied beauty. It is indeed 
even more bare of wood than those valleys of the central 
Apennines, of which, allowing for the difference of scale, 
it sometimes reminds one. The only tall tree is the 
Australian Eucalyptus, which though only recently intro- 
duced, is now common in the subtropical parts of South 
America, and already makes a figure in the landscape, for 
it is a fast grower. These Australian gum trees have 
now overspread the world. They are all over South 
Africa and on the Mediterranean coasts, as well as in 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 93 

Mexico and on the Nilghiri hills of southern India, 
where they have replaced the more beautiful native 
groves. 

In the wider and more level stretches of the valley, 
populous villages he near together, for the irrigated flats 
of the valley floor flourish with abundant crops, and 
the rich red soil makes the hillsides worth cultivating 
even without irrigation. Although stained by the blood 
of battles more than is any other part of Peru, the land 
has an air of peace and comfort. The mountains on 
each side seemed to be composed of igneous rocks, but 
only in one place could I discover evidences of recent 
volcanic action. About fifteen miles below Sicuani six 
or seven small craters are seen near together, most of 
them on the northeast side of the valley, the highest 
some twelve hundred feet above it ; and the lava flows 
which have issued from two or three of these are so 
fresh, the surface still so rugged and of so deep a black, 
that one may conclude that not many centuries have 
elapsed since the last eruption. The higher ranges that 
enclose the valley, crags above and curving lines of 
singular beauty below, evidently belong to a more 
remote geological age. Their contrasts of dark rock 
and red soil, with the flat smiling valley between and 
the noble snow peaks of the Vilcanota group filling the 
southern distance, make landscapes comparable in their 
warmth of colour and variety of form to those of the 
Italian Alps. They are doubly delightful to the traveller 
who has been passing through the savage solitudes that 
lie between this and the Pacific coast. Here at last 



94 SOUTH AMERICA 

he seems to get a notion of what Peru may have been 
like before the invaders came, and when a peaceful 
and industrious people laboured in the service of the Inca 
and the Sun God. Now, to be sure, there is a rail- 
way, and the station houses are roofed with corrugated 
iron. Yet the aspect of the land can have changed but 
little. The inhabitants are almost all Indian, and live 
and cultivate much as they did four centuries ago; their 
villages are of the same mud-built, grass-roofed cottages. 
They walk behind their llamas along the track, playing 
a rustic pipe as they go; and the women wash clothes 
in the brook swollen by last night's rain ; and up the side 
glens which descend from the untrodden snowy range be- 
hind, one catches glimpses of high, steep pastures, where 
perhaps hardly even a plundering Spaniard ever set his 
foot and where no extortionate curate preyed upon his 
flock. 

Swinging down the long canyon of the Vilcamayu — 
it is long, indeed, for there are four hundred miles more 
of it before it opens on the great Amazonian plain — 
and rattling through deep rock cuttings and round 
sharp curves above the foaming torrent, the line at 
last turns suddenly to the northwest towards Cuzco, 
and we bid farewell to the river. Gladly would we have 
followed it down the valley into scenery even more 
beautiful than that of its upper levels, where luxuriant 
forests along the stream contrast with the snowy 
summits of the Eastern Cordillera towering above. But 
from this point on there are only mule paths, and travel 
is so slow that a week would have been needed to reach 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 95 

the finest part of this scenery. 1 Renunciation is the 
hardest part of travelling. 

Our way to Cuzco lay up a wide lateral valley, enclosed 
by green hills, well cultivated and studded with populous 
villages, near one of which can be descried the ruins of a 
large ancient building which tradition attributes to the 
Inca Viracocha. The vale has an air of peace and prim- 
itive quiet, secluded and remote, as of a peaceful land 
where nothing had ever happened. At last, as the moun- 
tains begin to close in, the end of the journey comes in 
sight; and here, under steep hills enclosing a basin- 
shaped hollow — what in Peru is called a Bolson — 
lies Cuzco, the sacred City of the Sun. 

Cuzco belongs to that class of historic cities which 
have once been capitals of kingdoms and retain traces 
of their ancient glory, a class which includes Moscow 
and Krakau, Throndhjem and Upsala, Dublin and 
Edinburgh and Winchester, Aix la Chapelle and Bagdad 
and Toledo and Granada, a class from which imperial 
Delhi has now just emerged to recover its former rank. 
And Cuzco was the capital of an empire vaster than 
was ruled from any of those famous seats of power, 
the centre of a religion and a dominion which stretched 
southward from the Equator for two thousand miles 
and embraced nearly all that there was of whatever 
approached civilization in the South American Continent. 

Every traveller is familiar with the experience of 
finding that the reality of some spot on which his imag- 

1 Above this valley, nearly a hundred miles away to the northeast, 
rises the splendid peak of Salcantay, whose height, said to approach 
22,000 feet, will some day attract an aspiring mountain climber. 



96 SOUTH AMERICA 

ination has dwelt is unlike what it had pictured. 1 
had fancied a walled city visible from afar on a high 
plain, with a solitary citadel hill towering above it. 
But Cuzco lies inconspicuous, with its houses huddled 
close in its bolson at a point where three narrow glens 
descend from the tableland above, their torrents meeting 
in it or just below it ; and no buildings are seen, except 
a few square church towers, till you are at its gates. 
It stands on a gentle slope, the streets straight, except 
where the course of a torrent forces them to curve, and 
many of them too narrow for vehicles to pass one an- 
other, but vehicles are so few that this does not matter. 
They are paved with cobble stones so large and rough 
that the bed of many a mountain brook is smoother, 
and in the middle there is an open gutter into which 
every kind of filth is thrown, so that the city from end 
to end is filled with smells too horrible for description. 
Cologne, as Coleridge described it a century ago, and 
the most fetid cities of Southern Italy are fragrant in 
comparison. The houses, solidly built of stone, are en- 
closed in small, square court yards surrounded by rude 
wooden galleries. Many have two stories, with bal- 
conies also of wood in front, and a few shew handsome 
gateways, with the arms of some Spanish family carved 
on the lintel stone. One such bears the effigies of the 
four Pizarro brothers, and is supposed to have been 
inhabited by the terrible Francisco himself when he 
lived here. But the impressive features of the city are its 
squares. The great Plaza, a part of the immense open 
space which occupied the centre of the ancient Inca town, 
wants the trees and flower beds of the squares of Lima 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 97 

and Arequipa. But its ample proportions, with three 
remarkable churches occupying two sides of it, and the 
fortress hill of Sacsahuaman frowning over it, give it 
an air of dignity. The two smaller plazas, that called 
Cusipata and that of San Francisco, are less regular, 
but rudely picturesque, with arcades on two sides of 
them, and quaint old houses of varying heights, painted 
in blue, and bearing in front balconies frail with age. 
The older Spanish colonial towns, inferior as they are in 
refinements of architectural detail to the "ancient cities 
of Italy and Spain, have nevertheless for us a certain 
charm of strangeness, intensified, in the case of Cuzco, 
by the sense of all the changes they have witnessed. 

The cathedral, if not beautiful, is stately, with its 
two solid towers and its spacious and solemn interior. 
One is shewn a picture attributed to Van Dyck — be it 
his or not it is a good picture — and an altar at which 
Pizarro communicated, and a curious painting represent- 
ing ceremonies observed on the admission of monks and 
nuns in the seventeenth century. But what interested 
me most was a portrait in the sacristy, among those of 
other bishops of Cuzco, of the first bishop, Fray Vicente 
de Valverde. It may be merely a "stock" picture, 
made to order at a later time like those of the early 
Popes in the basilica of St. Paul at Rome. But one 
willingly supposed it taken from the life, because the 
hard, square face with pitiless eyes answered to the char- 
acter of the man, one of the most remarkable persons 
in the history of the Spanish Conquest, because he is as 
perfect an illustration as history presents of a minister 
of Christ in whom every lineament of Christian character, 



98 SOUTH AMERICA 

except devotion to his faith, had been effaced. 1 He was 
the friar who accompanied Pizarro on his expedition 
and stood by the leader's side in the square at Caxa- 
marca when he was welcoming as a friend the Inca 
Atahuallpa. When Atahuallpa declined the summons 
of Valverde to accept baptism and recognize Charles 
the Fifth as sovereign, Pizarro, whose men were fully 
armed, and had already been instructed to seize the 
unsuspecting Inca and massacre his followers, hesitated 
or affected for a moment to hesitate, and turned to 
Valverde for advice. "I absolve you," answered the 
friar. "Fall on, Castilians, I absolve you." With this 
the slaughter of the astonished crowd began : and 
thousands perished in the city square before night 
descended on the butchery. 

When Cuzco was taken, Valverde was made bishop 
of the new see, the first bishopric of Peru. Verily he 
had his reward. He did not long enjoy it. A few years 
later he was shipwrecked, while voyaging to Panama, 
on the coast near Tumbez, captured by the wild Indians 
of those parts, and (according to the story) devoured. 

Of the other churches, the most externally handsome 
is that of the Compania (the Jesuits), with its florid 
north fagade of red sandstone, a piece of cunningly con- 
ceived and finely executed ornamentation superior 
even to that of the church of the same Order at Arequipa. 
Internally there is most to admire in the church of 

1 It is fair to say that when the conquest was once accomplished, 
Valverde seems to have protested against the reduction of the In- 
dians to slavery. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 99 

Merced (Our Lady of Mercy, the patroness of Peru), 
for it has richly decorated ceilings on both stories of 
its charming cloisters, and a fine staircase leading up to 
the choir. All the larger churches have silver altars, 
some of them very well chiselled. But by far the most 
remarkable piece of work in the city is the pulpit of 
the old and now scarcely used church of San Bias. It 
is said to be all of one piece, the glory of an Indian 
craftsman, and is a marvel of delicate carving, worthy 
of the best executive skill of Italy or Spain. My scanty 
knowledge does not qualify me to express an opinion, 
but it was hard not to fancy that in this pulpit and in 
the fine ornamentation of the facades of the Jesuit 
churches I have described, there may be discovered 
marks of a distinctive type of artistic invention which 
was not Spanish, but rather Peruvian, and gave evidence 
of a gift which might, if cultivated, have reflected credit 
upon the Indian race. 

It has seemed worth while to dwell upon the eccle- 
siastical buildings of these three Peruvian cities just 
because there is so very little to attract the student 
of art in South America; less even than in Mexico. 
Though the two greatest Spanish painters lived after 
the days of Pizarro, one may say, broadly speaking, 
that the best days of Spanish architecture and of taste 
in works of art were passing away before these American 
countries were settled, and it was seldom that any- 
thing of high excellence was either brought from Europe 
or produced in South America, produced even in Peru, 
the wealthiest of all the colonial dominions of Spain. 



100 SOUTH AMERICA 

Before I turn from Spanish Cuzco to the ancient 
city a word may be said as to its merits as a place of 
residence. Its height (11,100 feet) and its latitude 
give it a climate free from extremes of heat or cold, 
and, for those who have capacious lungs and sound 
hearts, pretty healthful throughout the year. We found 
the air cool and bracing in the end of September. 
Disgusting as are the dirt and the smells, they do 
not seem to breed much disease; foul gases are prob- 
ably less noxious when discharged into the open air than 
when they ooze out into houses from closed drains. 1 
The country round is beautiful, bold heights surrounding 
a green and fertile vale, though there are so few trees 
that shade is wanting. Many places of great antiqua- 
rian interest are within reach, of course accessible by 
riding only, for there is only one tolerable road, that 
which leads down the valley to the Vilcamayu. Society, 
though small and old-fashioned, unfriendly to new ideas 
and tinged with ecclesiasticism, is simple mannered and 
kindly. No people can be more polite and agreeable 
than the Peruvians, whether of pure Spanish extraction, 
or mixed, as the great majority here are, with Indian 
blood. Though Cuzco is deemed, not less than Are- 
quipa, a stronghold of conservatism and clericalism, 
modern tendencies can make themselves felt. Shortly 
before my visit there had been a revolt of the students 
of the University against a rector deemed "unpro- 

1 While these pages are passing through the press (April, 1912) , 
I am informed that a serious effort is about to be made to lay drains 
in and generally to clean up Cuzco. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 101 

gressive" : and there had been chosen as his successor 
a young North American professor who had been living 
in Peru for a few years only, employed in some govern- 
ment work when he was appointed here. He seemed 
to be on good terms with both officials and pupils. 

The university is an old one, founded in 1598, but 
its revenues and the attendance of students are not 
worthy of its antiquity. Those who come seek in- 
struction in professional subjects, especially law and 
medicine. Nearly everywhere in South America the 
demand for teaching in philosophy, letters, or science is 
scanty indeed. The clergy, it need hardly be said, are 
not educated in these lay institutions. 

Though essentially a Spanish city in its edifices, 
Cuzco is predominantly Indian in its people. The 
Quichua language is that commonly spoken, and it is 
the Indian aborigines who give to the aspect of its 
streets and squares the picturesqueness which half 
atones for squalor. They set up their little booths, 
sometimes covered with canvas, along the arcades and 
in the plazas, and loaf about in their bright-coloured 
ponchos and broad, flat, straw hats, the dry-weather 
side of the straw covered with a sort of velveteen 
adorned with tinsel, and the wet-weather side with red 
flannel. Women lean over the rough wooden balconies 
on the first floors of the houses, and talk to the loungers 
in the plaza below. Strings of llamas bearing their 
burdens pass along, the only creatures, besides the tiny 
mules, who do any work. There are scarcely any wheeled 
vehicles, for those not forced by poverty to walk, ride 



102 SOUTH AMERICA 

mostly on donkeys; and the only events are saints' 
days, with their processions, occurring so frequently 
that the habit of laziness has unequalled opportunities 
for confirming itself. Though the Quichuas were 
under the Incas a most industrious race, and still give 
assiduous labour to their fields, the atmosphere of the 
city is one of easy idleness, nothing to do, and plenty 
of time to do it. The only manufactory we came 
across was a German brewery, — there is no place, 
however remote, where one does not find the enter- 
prising German. Neither is there any trade, except 
that of supplying a few cheap goods to the surrounding 
country folk. By far the best general warehouse is kept 
by an Italian gentleman who has got together an inter- 
esting collection of antiquities. 

Now let us turn from the Cuzco of the last three and 
a half centuries back to the olden time and see what 
remains of the ancient city of the Sun and of the Incas, 
his children. It is worth while to do so, for here, more 
than anywhere else in South America, there is some- 
thing that helps the traveller to recall a society and a 
religion so unlike the present that it seems half mythic. 
Whoever has read, as most of us did in our boyhood, of 
the marvels of the Peruvian Empire which Pizarro de- 
stroyed, brings an ardent curiosity to the central seat 
of that Empire, and expects to find many a monument 
of its glories. 

The reality is disappointing, yet it is impressive. 
One learns more from a little seeing than from 
reading many books. As our expectations had been 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 103 

unduly raised, it is right to give this reality with some 
little exactness of detail. The interest of the remains 
lies entirely in what, they tell us about their builders, 
for there is nothing beautiful, nothing truly artistic 
to describe. The traces of the Incas 1 to be seen in 
Cuzco, and, indeed, anywhere in Peru, are all of one 
kind only. They are Walls. No statue, no painting. 
No remains of a complete roofed building, either 
temple or palace; nothing but ruins, and mostly frag- 
mentary ruins. The besom of Spanish destruction 
swept clean. Everything connected with the old reli- 
gion had to perish : priests and friars took care of that. 
As for other buildings, it did not occur to anybody to 
spare them. Even in Italy, not long before Pizarro's 
day, a man so cultivated as Pope Julius the Second 
knocked about the incomparably more beautiful and 
remarkable buildings of ancient Rome when they inter- 
fered with his plans of building. i 
But the walls at Cuzco are remarkable. They are 
unique memorials, not only of power and persist- 
ence, but in a certain way of skill also, not in deco- 
rative art, for of that there is scarcely a trace left, 
but of a high degree of expertness in the cutting and 
fitting together of enormous blocks. Most of the 
streets of the modern city follow the lines of ancient 
pre-Conquest streets, and in many of these there are 

1 The name " Inca " properly belongs to the ruling family or clan in 
the Peruvian monarchy, of whose ethnic relations to its subjects we 
know very little, but I use it here to denote not only the dynasty, 
but the epoch of their rule, which apparently covered two centuries 
(possibly more) before the arrival of Pizarro. The expression " The 
Inca" means the reigning monarch. 



104 SOUTH AMERICA 

long stretches of wall from six or eight to sixteen 
or eighteen feet in height so entirely unlike Spanish 
buildings that their Inca origin is unquestionable. 
They are of various types, each of which probably 
belongs to an epoch of its own. The most frequent, 
and apparently the latest type, shews very large 
blocks of a dark grey rock, a syenite or trachyte, 
cut to a uniform rectangular oblong form, the outer 
faces, which are nearly smooth and slightly convex, 
being cut in towards the joinings of the other stones. 
The blocks are fitted together with the utmost care, 
so close to one another that it is no exaggeration to say 
that a knife can seldom be inserted between them. The 
walls which they make slope very slightly backward, 
and, in most cases, the stones are smaller in the upper 
layers than in the lower. Two such walls enclose a 
long and narrow street which runs southeastward from 
the great Plaza. They are in perfect preservation, and 
sustain in some places the weight of modern houses 
built upon them. There are very few apertures for 
doors or windows, but one high gateway furnishes a 
good specimen of the Inca door and is surmounted by a 
long slab on which are carved in relief, quite rudely, 
the figures of two serpents. In other places one finds 
walls of the same character, but with smaller blocks 
and less perfect workmanship. Of a third type the 
wall of the so-called Palace of the Inca Roca is the 
best instance. It is what we call in Europe a Cyclo- 
pean building, the blocks enormous and of various 
shapes, but each carefully cut and adjusted to the in- 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 105 

equalities of outline in the adjoining blocks, so that all 
fit perfectly together. One famous stone shews twelve 
angles into which the stones above, below, and at each 
side of it have been made to fit. This type seems older, 
perhaps by centuries, than that first described. In none 
of the walls is any mortar or any other kind of cement- 
ing material used : their strength consists in their weight 
and in the exactness with which they are compacted 
together. The most beautifully finished piece of all 
is to be seen in the remains of the great Temple of 
the Sun on whose site and out of whose ruins have 
been built the church and convent of St. Dominick. 
Here, at the west end of the church, there is what was 
evidently the external wall of the end of the temple. 
It is rounded, and each of the large squared stones 
is so cut as to conform perfectly to the curve of the 
whole. None of the single stones has the convexity 
which appears in the walls first described, because the 
surfaces of all have been levelled and polished so that 
they form one uniformly smooth and uniformly curved 
surface, as if they were all one block. A more exqui- 
sitely finished piece of work cannot be imagined. It is 
at least as good as anything of the same kind in Egypt, 
and stands as perfect now as it was when the Spaniards 
destroyed the superstructure of the temple. 

The city is full of these fragments of wall. I discovered 
in out-of-the-way corners some that were supporting 
little terraced garden beds, others in backyards, or even in 
pigsties, and it seemed to me that there were four or five 
distinct styles or types of stone cutting and stone fitting, 



106 SOUTH AMERICA 

belonging to different ages. 1 If all the buildings erected 
since 1540 could be removed without disturbing the older 
buildings beneath them, that which was left would be suf- 
ficient to give a fairly complete ground plan of the Inca 
city and enable us to form some idea of its character. 
But we should not then be much nearer to knowing 
what was the actual aspect of the great palaces and 
temples before the work of destruction began. The 
Incas built immense covered halls, we are told of one 
two hundred paces long by fifty wide, but it does 
not appear how they were roofed over, for the arch 
was, of course, unknown. Apparently there was little 
or nothing of that advanced form of art in pattern orna- 
mentation and in figures of men and animals which 
we admire in the ruins of Copan (in Honduras) or 
Palenque (in Mexico) and other places in Central 
America. Perhaps the intractable nature of the 
volcanic and other hard igneous stone used by the 
Incas compared with the comparatively soft lime- 
stones of Palenque and Mitla discouraged attempts at 
elaborate mural decoration. Perhaps the artistic talent 
of the Peruvians did not go far. Their pottery, 
whether plain or made to represent the forms of liv- 
ing creatures, is generally rude, and the paintings on 
wooden vessels shew only mediocre power of drawing, 
though they do shew that fine sense of colour which is 

1 A patient archaeologist might be able by examining and photo- 
graphing specimens of each style to determine their chronological 
succession and thus throw some light on the history of the city. The 
oldest type appeared to be that of the Inca Roca wall, very similar 
to that of the Sacsahuaman walls to be presently described. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 107 

present in most of the art work of the aboriginal 
Americans. 

Cuzco has no public museum, but there are two or 
three small private collections. In one of these the 
most interesting objects shewn us were the pictures on 
wood representing combats between Peruvian warriors 
and their enemies, the savage tribes of the eastern 
forests. The former fight with the spear and have the 
sling for their missile weapon, the latter use the bow, 
as do their descendants to this day. In this collec- 
tion there were also bows taller than a man, with arrows 
of corresponding size, formidable weapons, which some 
of the natives of the forest, placing them flat on the 
ground, draw with their feet and with which they are 
said to kill fish in the rivers as well as land game. 
These, and the beautiful feather plumes, and the rude 
heads of pumas, wild cats, and birds of prey, had all 
a flavour of barbarism, and were far inferior to the 
remains of Egyptian or Assyrian art. 1 The Peruvian 
mummies, specimens of which we also saw, are not 
laid out at full length, like those of Egypt, but have 
the knees pressed to the chin. 

Grand as are the walls inside Cuzco, they seem in- 
significant when one examines the more stupendous 
ramparts of the prehistoric fortress on Sacsahuaman 
Hill, which rises immediately above the city to a height 
of about six hundred and fifty feet. I describe them 
the more fully because much study has been of late 

1 Good specimens of all these things may be seen in the American 
Museum of Natural History of New York. 



108 SOUTH AMERICA 

years bestowed upon the (so-called) Cyclopean and 
other ancient walls of Europe, such as those of Tarra- 
gona in Spain, of Greek cities, like Tiryns and Naxos 
(near Taormina), and of the Volscian and Latin cities 
round Rome, so that an account of the more imposing 
Peruvian structures may be of interest to some read- 
ers. The hill, nearly halfway up which, on a terrace, 
are the remains of its palace attributed to the Inca 
Manco Capac, is in its upper part extremely steep, 
in places even precipitous, and commands a wonderful 
view over the mass of red-roofed houses, the long, 
straight streets in some of which the dark lines of Inca 
wall can just be discerned, the three broad plazas with 
Indians and their llamas creeping about like ants, the 
sunny vale below, and the snow-clad summits of the 
Nevado (snow mountain) of Ausungate, piercing the 
sky in the far distance. Stone ramparts ran all round 
the upper part of the hill, and parts of them still remain 
on this southern face. What with their height and 
solidity and with the natural strength of the ground, 
the fortress must have been on this side impregnable 
before the invention of gunpowder. But on the other, 
or northerly side, that turned away from Cuzco, the 
hill is not only less steep, but has also much less 
rise, for it is less than a hundred feet above the 
ground behind it. Here, therefore, since nature had 
done less, there was more for art to do; and here 
we find fortress walls on a scale of incomparable 
grandeur. 

They are built in three parallel lines, one behind the 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 109 

other, and both their length, nearly one third of a 
mile, and the massiveness of their construction, and the 
enormous size of many of the individual stones make 
this fortress one of the most impressive monuments of 
prehistoric times that the world contains. 1 It shews 
that those who raised it had a boldness of concep- 
tion and a persistent energy in carrying out that 
conception amazing in a primitive people, for the 
work seems to belong to a very early time, long 
anterior to those historic Incas whom the Spaniards 
overthrew. 

Hardly less wonderful than the gigantic proportions 
of these fortifications is the military skill shewn in their 
construction. Their line is not straight, as in most of 
the walls of ancient Greek and Italian and early medi- 
aeval cities, but consists of a series of salient and re- 
entering angles, so that from each salient angle and 
each inner angle the whole space outside and below 
the wall as far as the next projecting angle could be 
commanded by the garrison. This arrangement, which, 
while it increased the length of the work and required 
more labour to complete it, increased immensely its 
defensive efficiency, indicates a skill hardly to be 
expected in a race comparatively pacific, and more emi- 
nent in the arts of government than in those of war. 
Yet perhaps it was just because they were not first- 

1 Some of the granite blocks in the fortress at Osaka in Japan 
are even larger, but these belong to the time of Hideoshi, early in 
the seventeenth century. There is some reason to think that the 
city or at least the neighbourhood of Cuzco may have been inhabited 
from very remote times. 



110 SOUTH AMERICA 

class fighting men like the Aztecs or the Iroquois that 
the Quichuas were successful in devising expedients for 
defence. Sparta was the only considerable Greek city 
that did not surround herself with walls, because the 
valour of her people was deemed sufficient protection. 

On the top of the hill behind these lines of ramparts 
there are remains of ancient buildings, though none 
with such enormous stones. It is hard to make out 
what these edifices were, for every bit of ground built 
upon has been ransacked over and over again for 
hidden treasure. Peru is full of stories about fabulous 
quantities of Inca gold hidden away to save it from the 
rapacity of the conquerors, and some of the tales 
may be true, though hardly any such treasures have 
been found for more than a century past. But the 
story that there is a secret passage cut in the rock from 
the Inca castle at the top of the hill down through it 
and into Cuzco where it opens to the Temple of the 
Sun is too much for any but native credulity. These 
beliefs in long subterranean passages recur everywhere 
in the world. It was — perhaps still is — believed in 
Oxford that there is such an one from the church of St. 
Peter in the city to the ruined nunnery on the river at 
Godstow (Fair Rosamond's place of confinement) two 
miles distant. It is believed in Kerwan (in Tunisia) that 
the most sacred of the wells in that most sacred of all 
African cities communicates underground with the well 
Zem Zem in Mecca two thousand miles away and on 
the other side of the Red Sea. The most persistent 
treasure hunt carried on by the Peruvians has been that 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 111 

for the golden chain made by the Inca Huayna Capac, 
which was long enough to be stretched all round the 
great square of Cuzco, and was thrown into the lake 
of Urcos lest it should fall into the [hands of the Span- 
iards. Everybody believes it to be still at the bottom 
of the lake, which is very deep. 

Opposite the great walls and about a third of a mile 
away is a rocky eminence called, from a curious convex 
mass of extremely hard igneous rock upon it, the Roda- 
dero. The rock is polished smooth and has two pro- 
jecting ridges on its surface. How much of this pe- 
culiar slope down which many generations of Peruvian 
boys have rejoiced to slide — they were doing so in 
the days of Garcilaso, soon after the Conquest — is 
due to nature, how much to art improving nature, 
has been matter for controversy. But far more curi- 
ous are the seats carved in the hard rock all over 
the top and slopes of the hill, the cutting done with 
exquisite care and finish, the angles perfectly sharp, the 
flat parts perfectly smooth. The most remarkable is 
a set of thirteen seats, one in the centre and high- 
est, nine others declining from it on the left and three 
on the right. This is called the Seat of the Inca, but 
there is no record, nor any authentic tradition, of the 
purpose for which, or the persons by whom, it was con- 
structed, nor of the purpose of the many other seats, 
and small staircases, and niches, and basins similarly 
chiselled out of the rock which are scattered here 
and there all round. In one place two great and finely 
cut blocks look like fragments of a doorway shat- 



112 SOUTH AMERICA 

tered by an earthquake, and not far off there are singu- 
lar passages hewn through the rock, and now in parts 
closed, which have the appearance of a sort of laby- 
rinth. Looking at the Inca's Seat, one's first conjec- 
ture would be that it was a bench for judges to sit 
upon. Other seats look more like shrines meant for 
images; but no fragments of images are found. All 
these strange cuttings and polishings seem so inex- 
plicable that one would conjecture the mere caprice of 
a whimsical ruler, but for the immense pains that must 
have been taken in doing such perfect work in such 
hard material. No Spanish writer of Conquest days 
gives us any light. It is a riddle, the key to which 
is lost, and lost irrecoverably, because there are no 
inscriptions and no traditions. 

Reverting to the fortress of Sacsahuaman, there 
is a current view that it was erected as an outwork to 
defend Cuzco from the attacks of the fierce tribes of 
the eastern and northern valleys whose raids the Incas 
frequently had to repel. It seems, however, super- 
fluously huge as a defence against such enemies, not 
to add that they could easily have descended upon 
Cuzco from the other sides of the two ravines between 
which the fortress stands. More probably, there- 
fore Sacsahuaman is a very ancient stronghold, prob- 
ably much older than Cuzco, or at any rate than 
Cuzco's greatness. It may have been the earliest 
seat of some very early king or dynasty, and have 
been, in the flourishing days of the Inca monarchy, 
a citadel where the reigning sovereign kept his treas- 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 113 

ures and to which he could retire for safety in case of 
need. 

I am not attempting to describe all the relics of 
antiquity that are to be seen in or near Cuzco. There 
are striking ruins not far off, such as those at Ollantay- 
tambo and Pisac, and lower down the Vilcamayu Valley 
at Machu Picchu and Rosas Pata, as well as others 
still more distant in the high country between here and 
Lima. 1 But what is true at Cuzco is true every- 
where. The only ruins are of walls and gates of for- 
tresses and palaces; in a few spots of temples, also. 
In these there are evidences of enormous labour and 
considerable mechanical skill, but only slight evidences 
of artistic talent. The walls, perfectly cut and polished, 
have seldom the smallest ornament, except niches. 
There are no domes, for the art of vaulting was un- 
known, and hardly ever columns. So far as we can tell, 
the great Sun Temple at Cuzco consisted only of lofty 
walls enclosing courts, with no decoration but plates 
of gold attached to the walls. True it is that the 
Spaniards destroyed all the religious and many of the 
secular edifices, yet if there had been temples covered 
with ornaments like those found in Southern Mexico 
and Central America, some traces must surely have 
remained. 

1 Such as that at Choqquequirau described by my friend Profes- 
sor Bingham in his book entitled Across South America. He dis- 
covered, in 1911, an Inca building at a place on the river Pampa- 
conas fifteen days' journey north of Cuzco and only two thousand 
feet above sea-level. It was not previously known that theii 
power had extended so far in that direction. 
i 



114 SOUTH AMERICA 

Notwithstanding this want of decorative art, the 
Cuzco ruins leave upon the beholder a strong impres- 
sion, the impression of immense energy and will in 
those who planned these works, of patient and highly- 
trained labour in those who executed them. Only- 
despotic rulers commanding like the Egyptian kings 
a host of obedient subjects, could have reared such a 
structure as the fortress of Sacsahuaman. The race that 
could erect such buildings and gather such treasures as 
the Temple of the Sun possessed, and could conquer 
and rule a dominion of fifty days' journey from north 
to south, must have been a strong and in its way a gifted 
race. It is hard to believe that it was the ancestor of 
those stolid and downtrodden Indians whom one sees 
to-day, peddling their rude wares in the market place 
of Cuzco. It is their old imperial town, but there is 
scarcely one among them above the rank of a la- 
bourer; and during the last three centuries few in- 
deed have emerged from the abject condition to which 
the Conquest reduced them. 

The sudden fall of a whole race is an event so rare 
in history that one seeks for explanations. It may 
be that not only the royal Inca family, but nearly 
the whole ruling class was destroyed in war, leaving 
only the peasants who had already been serfs under 
their native sovereigns. But one is disposed to be- 
lieve that the tremendous catastrophe which befell 
them in the destruction at once of their dynasty, 
their empire, and their religion by fierce conquerors, in- 
comparably superior in energy and knowledge, com- 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 115 

pletely broke not only the spirit of the nation, but the 
self-respect of the individuals who composed it. They 
were already a docile and submissive people, and now 
under a new tyranny, far harsher than that of rulers 
of their own blood, they sank into hopeless apathy, 
and ceased even to remember what their forefathers had 
been., The intensity of their devotion to their sover- 
eign and their deity made them helpless when both 
were overthrown, leaving them nothing to turn to, 
nothing to strive for. The Conquistadores were wise 
in their hateful way, when they put forth the resources 
of cruelty to outrage the feelings of the people and 
stamp terror in their hearts. One cannot stand in the 
great Plaza of Cuzco without recalling the scene of 
a.d. 1571, when one of the last of the Inca line, an 
innocent youth, seized and accused of rebellion by the 
Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo, was executed in the 
presence of a vast Indian crowd that filled it. When 
the executioner raised the sword of death, there rose 
such a wail of horror that he paused, and the leading 
Spanish churchmen hastened to the viceroy and begged 
him for mercy. Determined to make an example, 
Toledo was inexorable. The young Inca, Tupac 
Amaru, was beheaded and his head stuck on a pike, 
and placed beside the scaffold. At midnight a Spaniard, 
looking out of a window that commanded the Plaza 
was amazed to see it again filled with Indians, all 
silent and motionless, kneeling in veneration before 
the head of the last representative of the sacred line. 
More than two hundred years later another more re- 



116 SOUTH AMERICA 

mote scion of the Incas, Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, 
who had taken the same name of Tupac Amaru, — I 
have already referred to him on p. 92, — had been 
stirred to indignation by what he saw of the Indian 
population suffering from the exactions as well of the 
Spanish landowners who held them in serfdom as of 
the rapacious Spanish officials. After many vain com- 
plaints, he headed a movement to obtain redress by 
force, not rejecting the authority of the Spanish 
Crown, but trying to rouse the Indians by appeals to 
the faint memories of Inca greatness. The hope of 
relief from their miseries drew thousands of the abo- 
rigines to his standard. But they were ill armed and 
worse organized; the race had no longer any strength in 
it for a fight, and in some months the rising was quelled, 
after frightful slaughter, its leader betrayed to the Span- 
iards, his family seized, and all brought prisoners to 
Cuzco. There, by the sentence of the Spanish judge, 
a monster named Areche, the uncle and son-in-law 
and wife of Tupac Amaru, had their tongues cut out 
and were executed before his eyes, that death might be 
made more horrible to him by the sight of their agonies. 
He was then, after his own tongue had been cut out, torn 
in pieces by four horses attached to his four limbs. All 
this happened in 1781, within the memory of the grand- 
fathers of men now living. Such atrocities were at once 
the evidence of what Spanish rule in Peru had been and 
a presage of its fall. Within twenty years thereafter 
began those first conspiracies against the authority 
of Spain which ushered in the War of Independence. 



CUZCO AND THE LAND OF THE INCAS 117 

Many another scene of horror and strife has Cuzco 
seen. Wandering through its streets, one is possessed 
every moment by the sense of how much has happened 
in a place where nowadays nothing seems to happen. 
Perhaps it is because its annals are so tragic that this 
sense is so strong ; but there are certainly few places 
where the very stones seem more saturated with his- 
tory. More than three centuries ago the historian 
Garcilaso de la Vega compared Cuzco to ancient Rome. 
The two cities have little more in common than the fact 
that both were capitals of dominions long since de- 
parted, and the seats of faiths long since extinct. But 
in both this feeling of a vista stretching far back and 
filled with many spectres of the past is overpowering. 
The long, grey, mouldering streets and houses of Span- 
ish Cuzco, the ancient walls of primitive Peruvian Cuzco, 
defying time better than the convents and the churches, 
each calling up contrasted races and civilizations, the 
plazas too vast for the shrunken population, the curious 
sense of two peoples living side by side in a place from 
which the old lif e has vanished and into which no new 
life has come, the sense of utter remoteness from the mod- 
ern world, all these things give to Cuzco a strange and 
dreamy melancholy, a melancholy all the deeper be- 
cause there was little in its past that one could wish 
restored. There were dark sides to the ancient civil- 
ization. But was it worth destroying in order to 
erect on its ruins what the Conquerors brought to 
Peru? 



118 SOUTH AMERICA 

NOTE ON THE FORTRESS OF SACSAHUAMAN 

The walls of Sacsahuaman are built in three parallel lines, the 
lowest of which stands on level ground, at the very base of the 
hill ; the second about six yards behind the first, and therefore on 
the slope; the third still higher on the slope, three yards behind 
the second. \The space behind each wall has been filled in and 
levelled, so as to be a nearly flat terrace, supported by the wall 
in front of it. These three fines of wall extend along and protect 
the whole northern face of the hill, nearly six hundred yards long, 
between the points where it falls abruptly into deep ravines to the 
east and the west, which give a natural defence. The outermost 
wall at the base of the hill is the highest, about twenty-six feet; the 
second is from eighteen to twenty feet ; the third, the least per- 
fectly preserved, is a little less high, perhaps fifteen feet. The 
stones in the outermost row are the largest. One is over twenty-five 
feet high, fourteen wide, and twelve thick. Not a few exceed fifteen 
feet in height and twelve in width. There were three openings or 
gateways in each wall, the largest of which is twelve feet high, and 
over each of these was laid a long flat slab. The blocks, which are 
of a hard, greyish limestone, are all or nearly all rudely square or 
oblong, though sometimes where the shape of one is irregular, the 
irregularity is cut into an entering angle and the next stone is made 
to fit into this with its projecting angle, thus knitting the structure 
together. The surface of each is slightly convex and bevelled down 
towards the outer lines, where it meets the blocks laid next. All 
are so carefully adjusted that even now there are virtually no in- 
terstices, though the fitting together may probably have been even 
more exact before earthquakes and time had begun to tell upon the 
fabric. Its strength, as there is no mortar, depends upon the mas- 
siveness of the stones and their cohesion. Each wall rises a little, 
perhaps a foot and a half, above the terrace immediately behind 
it, but the level of the terrace may probably have been originally 
somewhat lower, so that the bodies of those defending the fortress 
would be better covered by the wall in front of them against missiles 
from the enemy. 

The stones of Sacsahuaman have been brought from a hifi about 
three-quarters of a mile distant, where a huge mound of chips cut 
from them has been discovered by Mr. Bingham since the date of 
mv visit. (Edition of 1913.) 



CHAPTER IV 

LAKE TIT1CACA AND THE CENTRAL ANDES 

From Cuzco, the oldest of South American cities, 
with its mingled memories of an Indian and a Spanish 
past, I will ask the reader to follow me to a land of 
ancient silence where an aboriginal people, under the 
pressure of a stern nature, and almost untouched by all 
that modern civilization has brought, still lead the 
lives and cling to the beliefs that their ancestors led 
and held many centuries ago. This is the heart of 
the Andean plateau, where, in a country almost as 
purely Indian as it was when it submitted to Pizarro, 
lies Lake Titicaca. 

Ever since as a boy I had read of a great inland sea 
lying between the two ranges of the Cordillera almost 
as high above the ocean as is the top of the Jungfrau, 
I had wondered what the scenery of such mountains 
and such a sea might be like, and had searched books 
and questioned travellers without getting from them 
what I sought. There are no other bodies of fresh 
water on the earth's surface nearly so lofty, except on 
the plateaux of Central Asia, and none of these, such 
as the Manasarowar lakes in Tibet 1 and Lake Sir-i-kul 
in the Pamirs is nearly so extensive as this lake in Peru. 
It fills the lower part of an immense shallow depression 
between the eastern and western Cordilleras ; and the 

1 Dr. Sven Hedin gives the height of Tso L Mavang as 15,098 feet 
above sea level. 

119 



120 SOUTH AMERICA 

land both to the north and to the south of it is for a great 
distance so level that we may believe the area covered 
by its waters to have been at one time far greater. Its 
present length is about one hundred and twenty miles, 
its greatest width forty-one miles, and its area nearly 
equal to that of Lake Erie. The shape is extremely 
irregular, for there are many deep bays, and many 
far projecting promontories. There are also many 
islands, two of which, famous in Peruvian mythology, 
I shall presently describe. 

This central plateau of Peru is a singular region. 
As its height is from twelve thousand to thirteen thou- 
sand feet above sea level, the climate is always cold, 
except when one is actually exposed to the direct rays 
of the sun, but it varies comparatively little from the 
summer to the winter months ; and though snow often 
falls, it soon disappears. In so inclement an air, and 
with a rather scanty rainfall, only a few hardy crops 
can ripen, such as potatoes (the plant is a native of 
South America, and there are many other species of 
Solarium) barley, the Oca (Oxalis tuberosa, a sort of 
wood sorrel), and the Quinoa (a kind of edible Chen- 
opodium) 1 as well as maize, but this last only in the 
warmer and more sheltered places. There are few trees, 
and these stunted; nowhere a wood. Even the shrubs 
are mere scrub, so fuel is scarce and the people use for 

1 In some parts of Mexico the Indians use the seeds of a species 
of Chenopodium for food. Civilized man has not yet troubled him- 
self to enquire what possibilities of development there may be in 
some of the plants which primitive or barbarous man turned to 
account. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 121 

cooking purposes in the mountains the tufts of a large 
woody-rooted plant called Yareta, growing in the high 
mountains which, like the peat of Ireland, burns fiercely, 
but is soon burnt out, and, on the lower grounds, taquid 
(the droppings of the llama), as the droppings of the 
yak are similarly used in Tibet. Nobody thinks of 
lighting a fire for warmth : for while the natives seem 
not to feel the cold, white people shiver and put on 
more clothes. One is surprised that man should have 
continued to dwell in a land so ungenial when not far 
off to the east, on the other side of the eastern Cor- 
dillera, hot valleys and an abundant rainfall promise 
easier conditions of life. 

This lofty tract, stretching from the snowy peaks 
of the Vilcanota as far as La Paz in Bolivia, a dis- 
tance of more than two hundred miles, the northern 
and western parts of it in Peru, the eastern and southern 
in Bolivia, is really a pure Indian country, and is named 
the Collao. In ancient days it was one of the four divi- 
sions of the Inca Empire. The inhabitants speak a 
language called Aymard,, allied to the Quichua spoken 
farther north. In Inca days there were apparently 
many small tribes, each with its own tongue, but their 
names and memories have perished with their languages, 
and with the trifling exception of a small and very prim- 
itive race called the Urus (to be mentioned later) all 
the aborigines of the High Andes are now classified as 
Quichuas and Aymaras. The modern distinction be- 
tween Peru and Bolivia is purely arbitrary and politi- 
cal. Aymaras dwelling west of the lake in Peru are 



122 SOUTH AMERICA 

the same people as Aymaras dwelling east of it in Bo- 
livia. 

Like Tibet, which it most resembles in height and 
cold and dryness, this strange country produces no more 
than what its inhabitants consume and has nothing to 
export except alpaca wool and minerals, nor, at present, 
very much of these latter, for only few mines are now 
being worked. The population does not increase, but it 
holds its ground, and wherever the soil is fit for cul- 
tivation, that is to say, wherever it is not too stony or 
too swampy, it is cultivated by the Indians, who live 
here in the same rude fashion as their forefathers be- 
fore the Conquest. Nor is it only on the flat bottoms of 
the valleys that one sees their little patches of potatoes 
and barley. The steep slopes of the hills that rise from 
the lake have also been terraced to make ground level for 
cultivation, and each strip of soil is supported by a wall 
of loose stones well fitted together. These andenes, as 
they are called, which are common all over the hilly 
grounds of Peru, remind one of the vine-bearing terraces 
of the Rhineland, and like them witness to centuries of 
patient toil. As there is no manure nor other ferti- 
lizer, the soil is allowed to rest by lying fallow from 
time to time, so the area under cultivation in any one 
year is less than the number of the terraces might 
suggest. Though all the tillers are Indians, most of 
the land belongs to large proprietors who seldom come 
to it for more than a couple of months in the year, the 
peasants paying them either in a share of the crops, or a 
certain number of days' labour on the proprietor's own 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 123 

special hacienda or finca (farm) which his steward man- 
ages, or perhaps in personal service for some weeks ren- 
dered to him in the town he inhabits. Rude and harsh 
is the life of these peasants, though well above the fear 
of starvation and no more squalid than that of the agri- 
cultural peasantry in some parts of Europe. Their 
houses are of mud baked hard in the sun — the usual 
adobe of Spanish America — or perhaps of large stones 
roughly set in the mud as a cement; animals often 
share the family bedroom, and the sleeping places are 
a sort of platform or divan of earth raised a little from 
the floor along the walls of the hut. Furniture there is 
virtually none, for wood is scarce and costly so far from 
the coast on one side and the forests on the other, 
but some of them have scraped together a good deal 
of property, including rich dresses and ornaments fit to 
be displayed at festivals. For clothing they have a shirt 
and drawers of coarse cotton, with a poncho of heavy 
woollen cloth; for food, potatoes frozen and squeezed 
dry, to enable them to be stored, and barley; their 
only luxury is chicha beer, or alcohol when they can 
get it; their diversions, church festivals with proces- 
sions in the morning and orgiastic dances afterwards ; 
or a fight with the inhabitants of the neighbouring vil- 
lage. Yet with all this apparent poverty and squalor, 
they are in this region, and have been for many ages, 
more advanced in the arts of life than their neighbours, 
those half nomad tribes of the trans-Andean forests, 
who subsist on what their arrows or blow-pipes can 
kill, and live in terror of the jaguar and the anaconda 



124 SOUTH AMERICA 

and the still more dangerous packs of wild dogs and 
peccaries. Agriculture and settled life are always fac- 
tors of material progress, and the Aymaras would prob- 
ably have risen out of the sort of practical serfdom 
in which they He and from which scarcely any of them 
emerge, if they had not fallen under the dominion of an 
alien and stronger race who had no sympathy with 
them and did nothing to help them upwards. 

I return to the lake itself which fills the centre of 
this singular plateau. Its northern and northwestern 
coasts, lying in Peruvian territory, are low and the 
water shallow, while the eastern and southern, in 
Bolivia, are generally high and bold with many 
rocky promontories and isles lying off them. The 
greatest depth is about six hundred feet. Storms are 
frequent, and the short, heavy waves make navigation 
dangerous, all the more so because the water is so 
cold that, as is the case in Lake Superior also, a swim- 
mer is so soon benumbed that his chance of reaching 
land is slight. Ice sometimes forms in the shallower 
bays, but seldom lasts. Many are the water birds, 
gulls and divers, and flamingoes, and a kind of heron, 
besides eagles and hawks, though the big so-called 
turkey buzzard of the lower country does not seem 
to come so high, and the huge condor is no longer 
frequent. There are plenty of fish, but apparently 
of two genera only, the species (eight are enumerated) 
being most of them known only in this lake and in 
Lake Poopo, into which it discharges. The scantiness 
both of fauna and flora is natural when the unf avour- 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 125 

able climatic conditions are considered. Among the 
water plants the commonest is a sort of rush, appar- 
ently a species of, or allied to, the British and North 
American genus Scirpus, and called Totora. It grows 
in water two to six feet deep, rising several feet above 
the surface, and is the material out of which the In- 
dians, having no wood, construct their vessels, plaiting 
it and tying bunches of it together, for it is tough 
as well as buoyant. In these apparently frail craft, 
propelled by sails of the same material, they traverse 
the lake, carrying in each two or three men and some- 
times a pretty heavy load. These vessels which, 
having neither prow nor stern, though the ends are 
raised, resemble rafts rather than boats, are steered and, 
when- wind fails, are moved forward by paddles. 
Their merit is that of being unsinkable, so that when a 
storm knocks them to pieces the mariner may support 
himself on any one of the rush bundles and drift to shore 
if he does not succumb to the cold. They soon become 
waterlogged and useless, but this does not matter, for 
the totora can be had for the gathering, and the supply 
exceeds the demand. This primitive kind of craft was 
known on the coast of Peru also : the first Spanish ex- 
plorers met rafts of wood there carrying merchandise. 
Nowadays four small steamers ply on the lake, one 
of them making a regular tri-weekly service from 
Puno, in Peru, the terminus of the Peruvian Southern 
railway, to Guaqui in Bolivia, whence a railway runs 
to La Paz. This is at present the quickest way from 
Panama and the coast of Peru to Central Bolivia. 



126 SOUTH AMERICA 

The water of Titicaca is pure and exquisitely clear. 
Some have described it as brackish, but I could dis- 
cover no saline taste whatever. Many streams enter 
it from the surrounding snow-clad mountains; and 
it discharges southward by a river called the Desa- 
guadero, which flows with a gentle current across the 
Bolivian plateau for one hundred and twenty miles into 
the large, shallow lagoon of Poopo or Aullagas, itself 
once part of that great inland sea of which Titicaca 
is now the largest remnant. This lake of Poopo has 
no outlet to the sea. Part of its water is licked up 
by the fiery sun of the desert : the rest sinks into the 
sands and is lost. 

We spent two days sailing on the lake, visiting the 
famous modern shrine of the Virgin of the Light at 
Copacavana on the mainland and the famous ancient 
shrine of the Rock of the Sun and the Wild Cat on the 
island of Titicaca which has given its name to the lake. 
When the grey clouds brood low upon the hills, stern 
and gloomy indeed must be the landscape in this 
bleak land. But our visit fell in the end of September, 
the spring of Peru, when such rains as there are had 
begun to refresh the land after the arid winter. The 
sun was bright. Only a few white clouds were hanging 
high in air or clinging to the slopes of the distant moun- 
tains ; and the watery plain over which we moved was 
a sheet of dazzling blue. The blue of Titicaca is pecul- 
iar, not deep and dark, as that of the tropical ocean, 
nor opaque, like the blue-green of Lake Leman nor like 
that warm purple of the iEgean which Homer compares 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 127 

to dark red wine, but a clear, cold, crystalline blue, even 
as is that of the cold sky vaulted over it. Even in this 
blazing sunlight it had that sort of chilly glitter one 
sees in the crevasses of a glacier; and the wavelets 
sparkled like diamonds. 

The Peruvian shore along which we were sailing was 
steep and bold, with promontories jutting out and 
rocky islets fringing them. Far away to the east 
across the shining waters the Bolivian coast rose in 
successive brown terraces, flat-topped hills where the 
land was tilled, and higher up bluish grey ridges pass- 
ing into a soft lilac as they receded, and farther 
still, faint yet clear in the northeast, the serrated 
lines of the snowy Cordillera which divides the lake 
basin from the valleys that run down to the east and 
the Amazonian forests. There was something of mys- 
tery and romance in these far distant peaks, which few 
Europeans have ever approached, for they lie in a dry 
region almost uninhabited because hardly worth in- 
habiting, — 

" a waste land where no man goes 
Or hath gone, since the making of this world." 

The nearer and higher range to the southeast of the 
lake, which the natives call the Cordillera Real, and 
geographers the range of Sorata, was almost hidden by 
the thick clouds which were by this time — for it was 
now ten o'clock, and the sun was raising vapours from 
the valleys — gathering on its snows, and not till the 
evening did its grand proportions stand disclosed. 
There were all sorts of colours in the landscape, bright 



128 SOUTH AMERICA 

green rushes filling the shallow bays, deep black lava 
flows from a volcanic peak on the west, and a wonderful 
variety of yellows, pinks, and violets melting into each 
other on the distant hills. But the predominant tone, 
which seems to embrace all the rest was a grey-blue 
of that peculiar pearly quality which the presence of 
a large body of smooth water gives. Views on a great 
lake can be more impressive than almost any ocean 
views, because on the ocean one sees only a little way 
around, whereas, where distant heights are visible 
beyond the expanse of a lake, the vastness of the land- 
scape in all its parts is realized. Here we could see in 
two different directions mountain ranges a hundred 
miles away : and the immensity was solemn. 

The village of Copacavana, to which we first turned 
our course, stands a little above the lake at the foot of 
rocky heights, beyond which rises a lofty volcano, said 
to have been active only a century ago. Traces of 
antiquity are found in the polished stone seats, two on 
each side of a higher one, called the Judgment Seat of 
the Inca, and in steps cut here and there, all in the hard 
rock, their form resembling that of those near Cuzco, 
described in the last chapter, and their purpose no less 
obscure. 1 Other ruins and abundant traditions prove 
that the place was a noted seat of worship in Inca days. 
There stood on it, say the early Spanish chroniclers, 
not only gilded and silvered figures of the Sun and 

1 Dr. Uhle has suggested that the so-called seats may have been 
places on which to set images. Mr. Bingham thinks they were 
more probably spots on which priests stood to salute the rising sun 
by wafting kisses with their hands, a Peruvian practice described 
by Calancha, who compares the book of Job, chap, xxxi, v. 27. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 129 

Moon, but also older idols, belonging to some older 
local religion, one in particular which is described as 
having a head like an egg with a limbless body, 
wreathed with snakes. When these figures and their 
shrines were demolished, a church was erected on the 
same spot, which presently became famous by the set- 
ting up in it of a sacred image of Our Lady. It is the 
Santissima Virgen de la Candelaria, carved by a scion 
of the Incas, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, in a.d. 1583. 
This image had been seen by a pious friar to send out 
rays of light around it : miracles followed, and an 
Augustinian monastery was founded and placed in 
charge of the sanctuary, which soon became the most 
frequented place of pilgrimage through all South 
Amerca. Even from Mexico and from Europe pil- 
grims come hoping for the cure of their diseases. The 
figure is about a yard high, and represents a face of 
the Indian type in features and colour, though less dark 
than the equally sacred figure of the Virgin of the 
Pillar at Saragosa in Spain. It wears a crown of gold, 
with a gold halo outside the crown, has a half moon 
under its feet, and is adorned with many superb gems. 
The church is spacious and stately. The Camarin 
or sacred chamber in which the image stands is be- 
hind the great altar and approached by two stair- 
cases, the stone steps much worn by the knees of the 
ascending worshippers. The Augustinian monks were 
turned out in 1826, after the revolutionary war, but 
recently a few Franciscans have been settled in a home 
too large for them, so the wide cloisters are melancholy, 



130 SOUTH AMERICA 

and echo to few footfalls. Nevertheless great crowds 
of Indians still resort hither twice a year, on February 2, 
the feast of the Candelaria (Candlemas), and on August 
5 and 6. Within the sacred enclosure which surrounds 
the church is a lofty cupola supported by columns, 
open at its sides so that the three tall crosses within it 
are visible, and roofed in a sort of Moorish style with 
bright green and yellow tiles, of the kind which North 
Africa has borrowed from the East. Round it are the 
accustomed pilgrimage " stations," and at the corners 
of the court, which is entered by a lofty gateway and 
planted with trees, are square brick buildings, wherein 
lie the bones of pilgrims. The shining tiles of this 
cupola, with the similarly decorated dome and tower 
of the church behind, make a striking group, whose 
half Moorish character looks strange in this far western 
land. The scene at the great festivals when the ex- 
cited Indian crowd makes church and court resound 
with hymns in Aymard and when, after the Christian 
services of the day, the dances of primitive heathendom 
are kept up all through the darkness with wild shout- 
ings and jumpings, till they end in a sort of jig, is 
described as strange and revolting. These dances come 
down from a time when this was a seat of Indian nature 
worship, and when images of the Sun and Moon were 
taken in pomp from the shrine here to the shrines upon 
the Sacred Isles. 

To those isles we now bent our course. Delightful 
was the voyage along the southern shore of the lake, 
past shallow bays where the green water lapped softly 
in the rushes, across the openings of inlets that ran far 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 131 

in between walls of rock, with new islands coming into 
view and glimpses of newsnowpeaks in the distance rising 
behind the nearer ranges, all flooded by a sunlight that 
had the brilliance without the sultry power of the tropics. 
Koati or Koyata, the Island of the Moon, is said to 
take its name from Koya, the Quichua word for 
queen, the Moon being the wife of the Sun, whose wor- 
ship the Incas established wherever their power ex- 
tended. The isle is about two miles long, a steep ridge, 
covered in parts with low shrubs and grass ; the rest 
cultivated, the slopes being carefully terraced to the 
top. The most interesting group of ruins stands in a 
beautiful situation some sixty feet above the shore, on 
the uppermost of four broad terraces, supported by 
walls. One of these walls is of the finished Cuzco style 
of stonework, the rectangular blocks well cut and 
neatly fitted to one another. It is probably of Inca 
date. That the large ruined edifice above has the same 
origin may be concluded from the niches which occur 
in the walls of its chambers. The purpose of such 
niches, frequent in the Cuzco walls, and indeed all 
over Peru, has never been explained. They are often 
too shallow for cupboards or wardrobes, and too high 
for images, yet it is hard to suppose them meant merely 
for ornament. This edifice, originally in two stories, 
is a mass of chambers, mostly small, which are con- 
nected by narrow passages. The large walled court 
which adjoins it is adorned by stuccoed niches. The 
walls are well preserved, but all the ceilings and roofs 
have gone. There are so few apertures for light 
that it is hard, as in most of the ancient Peruvian 



132 SOUTH AMERICA 

houses to understand how light was admitted. Prob- 
ably light was sacrificed for the sake of warmth, for 
the nights are extremely cold, even in summer. Door- 
ways are covered sometimes by a single slab, sometimes 
by flat stones projecting each beyond the other, so as to 
have the effect of an arch, but no true arch ever seems 
to have been found in Peru or anywhere else in the 
Western Hemisphere. Sacrificial objects, dug up in 
front of the building, confirm the legend that the place 
was a shrine of the Moon Mother, but the name by which 
it has been known is the Palace of the Virgins of the 
Sun. There may, therefore, have been in conjunction 
with the shrine one of the numerous establishments in 
which the Incas kept the women who were sent up to 
them as a tribute from the provinces, and who, among 
other things, wove fine fabrics and made various articles 
needed for worship. The early Spanish writers, with 
their heads full of Christian nuns and Roman Vestals, 
, called them Virgins of the Sun, but the name was al- 
together inappropriate, for many of them were kept as 
concubines for the reigning Inca. 

Four miles from Koati and two from the mainland, 
lies the larger and more sacred Island of the Sun. 
It is ten miles long, nowhere more than a mile wide, 
and very irregular in shape, being deeply indented 
by bays. A ridge of hills, rising in places to one 
thousand feet or more, traverses it from end to end, and 
much of the surface is too steep and rocky for tillage. 
There are many groups of ruins on it, the origin and 
character of some among which have given rise to con- 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 133 

troversies into which I need not enter, proposing to 
describe two only. One of these is the so-called 
Fountain, or Bath and Garden of the Inca. Two 
buildings stand on the shore, evidently of a date 
anterior to the Conquest, and one was probably a royal 
residence. The most recent and most competent 
investigators divide them into two classes: those 
which the Indians call Chulpas, and are the work 
of an earlier race or races, and those which they ascribe 
to the Incas, the latter being larger and better built, 
and accompanied by pottery, weapons, and other relics, 
indicating a more advanced culture. Hard by a flight of 
low steps, rising from the water through a grove of trees, 
leads up to a spot where a rivulet, led in a channel from 
the hill above, pours itself into a receptacle hewed out 
of one piece of stone, whence it pursues its course in a 
murmuring rill to the lake below. The terraced garden 
on each side is planted with flowers, most of which are the 
same as those in European or North American gardens; 
but the brilliant red blossoms of the shrub called the 
Flor del Inca give a true local colour, and the view over 
the lake to the distant snows is unlike anything else 
in the world. How much of the beauty we now see 
was planned by the unknown monarch, who first made 
these terraces, and did the spot commend itself to him 
by the wonderful prospect it commands ? Most of the 
so-called palaces of these isles occupy sites that look 
across the lake to the great snowy range, but a learned 
archaeologist suggests that this was due not to admiration 
of their grandeur, but to veneration for them as potent 



134 SOUTH AMERICA 

deities so that they might be more readily and fre- 
quently adored. 

On this majestic range our eyes had been fixed all day 
long. Its northernmost summit, Illampu, stands more 
than twenty miles back from the eastern shore of the 
lake, and more than thirty miles from the Island of the 
Sun. Thence the chain trends southward, ending one 
hundred miles away in the gigantic Illimani, which 
looks down upon La Paz. All day long we had watched 
the white clouds rise and gather, and swathe the great 
peaks and rest in the glacier hollows between them, and 
seem to dissolve or move away, leaving some top clear 
for a moment, and then settle down again, just as one 
sees the vapours that rise from the Lombard plain form 
into clouds that float round and enwrap Monte Rosa 
during the heats of a summer day. Evening was be- 
ginning to fall when our vessel, after coasting along 
the island, anchored in the secluded bay of Challa, 
where, behind a rocky cape, there is an Indian hamlet and 
a garden and stone tank like that at the Bath of the 
Inca. We landed and rambled through it, finding 
its thick trees and rustling shade specially charm- 
ing in this bare land. Just as we emerged from them 
and regained the lake shore, the sun was setting, 
and as the air cooled, the clouds that draped the moun- 
tains thinned and scattered and suddenly vanished, and 
the majestic line of pinnacles stood out, glowing rosy red 
in the level sunlight, and then turned in a few moments 
to a ghostly white, doubly ghostly against a deep blue- 
grey sky, as swift black night began to descend. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 135 

Early next morning we set off on foot along the track, 
well beaten by the feet of many generations of worship- 
pers, which leads along the rocky slopes from Challa to 
the Sanctuary of the Rock. Here are no houses, for 
this end of the isle is rough and bare, giving only scanty 
pasture and a few aromatic flowers, but the little 
bays where the green water ripples on the sands, and the 
picturesque cliffs, and the vast stretch of lake beyond, 
made every step delightful. To our surprise we passed 
a spot where some enterprising stranger had bored for 
coal and found a bed, but not worth working. One 
could hardly be sorry, for though fuel is badly needed 
here, a colliery and its chimney would fit neither the land- 
scape nor the associations. Less than three miles' 
walking brought us to a place where the remains of a wall 
cross the island, here scarcely a mile wide, and seem to 
mark off the sacred part which in Inca days was entered 
only for the purposes of worship. A little farther, two 
marks in the rock, resembling giant footprints, are, 
according to Indian tradition, the footprints of the 
Sun God and the Moon Goddess, when they appeared 
here. The marks are obviously natural and due to the 
form in which a softer bit of the sandstone rock has 
scaled off and left a whitish surface, while the harder 
part, probably containing a little more iron, as it is 
browner in hue, has been less affected by the elements. 
Then, after ascending a few low steps which seem to be 
ancient, we came out on a level space of grass in front 
of a ridge of rock about twenty-five feet high. This is 
Titi Kala, the Sacred Rock, the centre of the most 



136 SOUTH AMERICA 

ancient mythology of South America. Its face, which 
looks southwest over this space of grass, apparently 
artificially levelled, is on that side precipitous, present- 
ing a not quite smooth face in which veins of slightly 
different colours of brown and yellowish grey are seen. 
At one point these veins so run as to present some- 
thing like the head of a wild cat or puma ; and as Titi 
means a wild cat in Aymara, and Kala, or Kaka a rock, 
this is supposed to be the origin of the name Titi Kala, 
which has been extended from the rock to the island and 
from the island to the lake. 1 

The rock is composed of a light yellowish brown 
rather hard sandstone of carboniferous age, with a slaty 
cleavage. The back of the ridge is convex, and is easily 
climbed. From it the ground falls rapidly to the lake, 
about three hundred feet below. Except for what may 
possibly be an artificial incision at the top, the rock 
appears to be entirely in its natural state, the cave-like 
hollow at its base shewing no sign of man's handiwork. 
Neither does any existing building touch it. There 
are, however, traces of walls enclosing the space in front 
of it, especially on the north side, where there seems 
to have been a walled-in enclosure; and there are 
other ancient remains hard by. The only one 
of these sufficiently preserved to enable us to conjec- 
ture its purpose is a somewhat perplexing two-storied 
edifice, resembling, though less large and handsome, 
that which I have described as existing on the island 

1 Lake Titicaca was originally, it would seem, called the lake of 
Chuouito, from an ancient town on its western shore. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 137 

of Koati. It is called the Chingana, or Labyrinth, and 
doubtless dates from Inca times, as it contains niches 
and other features characteristic of the architecture of 
that period. The numerous rooms are small, scantily 
lighted, and connected by narrow passages. A few 
flowers had rooted on the top of the walls, and I found 
tufts of maidenhair fern nestling in the moist, dark cor- 
ners within. All the roofs have perished. There is 
nothing to suggest a place of worship, so probably 
the building contained the quarters provided for the 
various attendants on the religious rites performed here, 
and perhaps also for the women who were kept near 
many sanctuaries and palaces for the service of the 
Sun and the Incas. None of the other ruins is identi- 
fiable as a temple, so we are left in doubt whether any 
temple that may have existed was destroyed by the zeal 
of the Spanish Conquerors, or whether the worship of the 
Sun and the local spirits was conducted in the open air 
in front of the Rock, whose surface was, according 
to some rather doubtful authorities, covered with plates 
of gold and silver. In front of the Rock there lies a flat 
stone which it has been conjectured may have been used 
for sacrifices. All our authorities agree that the place 
was most sacred. Some say no one was allowed to 
touch it ; and at it oracles were delivered, which the 
Spaniards accepted as real, while attributing them to 
devils who dwelt inside the rock. Of the many legends 
relating to the place only two need be mentioned. One 
is that here the Sun, pitying the barbarous and wretched 
condition of men, took his two children, Manco Capac 



138 SOUTH AMERICA 

and Mama (mother) Occlo, and giving them a short staff 
or wand of gold, directed them to go forward, till they 
should find a place where the staff on being struck 
against the ground entered and stuck fast. They 
travelled to the north for many days, and the wand 
finally entered the earth at Cuzco, where they accord- 
ingly built a city and founded their dominion, Manco 
being the first of the Inca dynasty. The other tale is 
that for a long, long time there was darkness over the 
earth and great sorrow among men till at last the Sun 
suddenly rose out of the Rock on Titicaca, which was 
thenceforward sacred and a place of sacrifice and oracles. 
Other traditions, more or less differing from these in 
details, agree in making Titicaca the original home of 
the Incas, and one of them curiously recalls a Mexican 
story by placing on it a great foreign Teacher whom 
the Spaniards identified with St. Thomas the Apostle. 1 
In these stories, some written down by Spanish ex- 
plorers or treasure seekers at the time of the Con- 
quest or collected subsequently by learned ecclesias- 
tics, some still surviving, with grotesque variations, 
in the minds of the peasantry, we may distinguish 

1 St. Thomas, according to an early legend, preached the Gospel 
on the coast of Malabar, so the Spanish ecclesiastics when they 
came to Mexico and Peru and heard tales of a wise deity or semi- 
divine teacher who had long ago appeared among the natives, con- 
cluded this must have been the Apostle, the idea of the connection of 
Eastern Asia with these new Western lands being still in their minds. 

In the ancient city of Tlascala in Mexico I have seen a picture 
representing St. Thomas preaching to the natives in the guise of the 
Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Snake. St. Thomas ia 
depicted as half serpent, half bird, but with a human head. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 139 

three salient points, — first, the veneration for the 
Rock as an object; secondly, its close relation to Sun 
worship ; and thirdly, its connection with the Inca rulers 
of Cuzco. It is a plausible view that from ancient 
pre-Inca times the Rock was a Huaca or sacred object (in 
fact a fetish, i.e. an object inhabited by a spirit) to the 
primitive tribes of the island and lake coasts, as the 
cleft rock of Delphi was to the Greeks, even as the Black 
Stone which they called the Mother of the gods was 
to the Phrygian worshippers of Cybele, as perhaps the 
Stone of Tara — perhaps even the Lia Fail or Coronation 
Stone of Scone and now of Westminster Abbey — was to 
our Celtic ancestors. When the Incas established their 
dominion over the region round the lake they made this 
spot a sanctuary of the sun, following their settled policy 
of superadding the imperial religion of Sun worship — the 
Sun being their celestial progenitor — to the primitive 
veneration and propitiation of local spirits which their 
subjects practised. It was thus that the Roman Em- 
perors added the worship of the goddess of Rome to that 
of the local deities of Western Asia and Africa and set 
up to her great temples, like that at Pergamos, among 
and above the older shrines. If there be truth in 
the legend that the Incas were themselves originally 
a tribe of the Collas of the plateau who quitted 
their former seats to go northward to the conquest 
of Cuzco, it would be all the more natural for them to 
honour this sanctuary as an ancient home of their race. 
The isle seems to have been abandoned and the wor- 
ship forbidden soon after the Conquest. No Christian 



140 SOUTH AMERICA 

church was ever placed near it, as might have been done 
if it were deemed necessary to wean the people from 
rites still practised there. What the early Spanish 
chroniclers tell us of the devotion paid to it is amply 
confirmed by the religious ornaments and the numer- 
ous objects connected with worship which have been 
dug up near the Rock, including woollen ponchos of ex- 
traordinary fineness of workmanship and colour, and 
golden figures of men (or deities) and of llamas, the 
llama being a sacred animal like the bull in Egypt. 
The native Indians still approach the Rock with 
awe. Lightning and Thunder, as well as the Sun 
and the local spirits were worshipped, and human sac- 
rifices, frequently of children, were offered. Standing 
on this lonely spot one thinks of what it may have wit- 
nessed in old days. What weird dances and wild up- 
roar of drums and pipes before the Rock, and still 
wilder songs and cries of frenzied worshippers ! What 
shrieks of victims from the Stone of Sacrifice! Now 
all is silence, and nothing, except the crumbling ruins 
of the Chingana, speaks of the past. No sound except 
the sighing of the breeze round the cliff and the splash 
of the wavelets as they break on the pebbly beach 
beneath. There is no habitation near. The green 
outlying islets, one of which is said to have run with 
the blood of human sacrifices, are all desolate. The 
villages on the Bolivian shore to the east and the Peru- 
vian shore to the west are too distant to be visible, while 
to the north the vast expanse of glittering blue stretches 
out till the blue depths of heaven bend to meet it. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 141 

Bidding farewell to the Island of the Sun, we sailed 
southward through the Straits of Tiquina, only half a 
mile wide, which connect the principal lake with the 
shallower gulf at its southeastern end, called the Lake 
of Vinamarca. On each side of the channel between 
heights whose igneous rocks seemed to indicate volcanic 
action are picturesque little Indian villages, St. Paul 
on the southwestern, St. Peter on the northeastern shore. 
It was market day, and the balsas were carrying the 
peasants homeward. I have already referred to these 
raft-like boats, formed of bundles of Totora tied together, 
and equipped with a small mast carrying a sail also of 
the same kind of rush. There were only passengers 
upon these, but the rushes are so much lighter than 
water that they can support a considerable weight. 
Large blocks of building stone are often carried on 
them. The Indians were kneeling on them and pad- 
dling, one on each side. Progress was slow, but in this 
country time is no object; it is almost the only thing 
of which there is more than enough in Bolivia. 

We had now got nearer to the great Cordillera Real, 
the range of unbroken snow and ice which runs south- 
ward from the village of Sorata nearly to the city of La 
Paz, and could better make out the several peaks and 
the passes which separate them and the splendid glaciers 
which stream down their hollows far below the line of 
perpetual snow. Eight or nine great masses can be 
distinguished, the loftiest and northernmost of which, 
Illampu, is nearly 22,000 feet high, the rest ranging 
from 19,000 to 21,000. 



142 SOUTH AMERICA 

Illampu consists of two peaks and is the mountain 
which European travellers and maps call Sorata, from 
the town of that name near its northern base. It con- 
sists of two peaks, the higher of snow, called by the 
natives, Hanko Uma, 1 and the slightly lower one, of 
rock, Illampu proper. This, which is the loftiest of 
the range, and was sixty or seventy years ago be- 
lieved to be the loftiest in the western hemisphere, was 
climbed by Sir Martin Conway, who has described his 
ascent and his other adventures in Bolivia, in a very in- 
teresting book, 2 but he found the last slope just below 
the top so unstable, owing to the powdery condition 
of the snow, that he was obliged to turn back. So far 
as I know, no other summit of the range, unless Illi- 
mani is to be accounted a part of it, has ever been 
ascended. At the end of the chain the splendid pyramid of 
Kaka Aka, also called Huayna Potosi, seems to approach 
21,000. After it the range sinks a little till it rises again 
fifty miles farther south to over 21,000 feet in the snowy 
summit of Illimani. The Aymaras seem to have no 
special names for most of these peaks, and when asked 
for one answer that it is Kunu Kollu (a snow height). 3 
That is the case in many other mountainous countries. 
Neither in the White Mountains of North America 
nor in the Rockies and Cascades do the aborigines 

1 Sir M. Conway gives the height of the higher peak Ancohuma 
(Hanko Uma) at 21,490. The loftiest summits in Peru seem to be 
Huascaran (some way N.N.E. of Lima), about 22,150 feet, and Co- 
ropuna (see p. 57), 21,700 feet. Aconcagua in Chile is the culminat- 
ing point of the Andes and the whole Western World (see p. 260) . 

2 Climbing and Exploration in the Bolivian Andes, 1901. 

8 See Bandolier, Islands of Titicaca and Koati, ch. I, and notes. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 143 

seem to have had names for more than a few separate 
peaks. Names were not needed, for they seldom ap- 
proached the great heights. On the other hand, in 
Scotland and Ireland every hill has its Gaelic name 
because the herdsmen had occasion to traverse them. 
In the Tatra Mountains of Northern Hungary almost 
the only names of peaks are those taken from villages 
near their foot. Here the tract at the foot of the range 
is desert; nobody, unless possibly a hunter now and 
then pursuing a vicuna, has any reason for approach- 
ing it. 

The Cordillera Real is not of volcanic origin, though 
there may be recent eruptive rocks here and there 
in it. None of the great summits shew the forms 
characteristic of the volcano, and my friend Sir M. 
Conway tells me that all the rocks he saw seemed to 
be granite and gneiss or mica schist, or perhaps very 
old palaeozoic strata. The region has been very little 
explored. There must be some superb glacier passes 
across it. 

The scenery of this lake of Vinamarca, which we 
were now traversing, has a grand background in the 
Snowy Range, but the foreground is unlike that of 
Titicaca, for the shores are mostly low, shallow bays 
covered with water plants, over which flocks of lake 
fowl flutter, with the hills softer in outline than those 
of the great lake, though stranger and more varied in 
colour, for black masses of volcanic rock rise on 
the north and bare hills of a deep red on the south- 
west. Here is the point where the river Desaguadero 



144 SOUTH AMERICA 

flows out and a little to the east is the port of Guaqui 
whence runs the railway to La Paz. Here we halted for 
the night, a very cold one, and set off in a cold morning 
for the Bolivian capital. An open valley runs south be- 
tween flat-topped stony ridges affording thin pasturage, 
past clusters of Indian huts ; and after some few miles, 
we see huge blocks of stone scattered over a wide space 
of almost level ground. These are the last ruins I 
have to mention, and in some respects they form the 
most remarkable group of prehistoric structures not 
only in the Andean countries, but in the Western Hemi- 
sphere. I will not attempt to describe them, for they 
are too numerous and too chaotic, but only to convey 
some impression of the more significant objects. The 
place is Tiahuanaco, or Tihuamacu, as the Indians of 
the neighbourhood call it. 

The configuration of the ground, and the remains of 
what seems to have been an ancient mole for the 
landing of boats, suggest that in remote ages the 
waters of the lake came close up to this spot, though 
it is now five miles distant. I have already remarked 
that the character of the western and northern shores of 
Titicaca, as well as Indian traditions that places now 
far from the shore were once approachable by water, 
seem to indicate that the lake has receded within his- 
torical times and may be still receding. The ruins are 
scattered over a very large area, out those of most in- 
terest are to be found within a space of about half a 
square mile, the rest being mostly detached and scat- 
tered blocks to which it is hard to assign any definite 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 145 
i 

plan or purpose. Within this space three deserve 

special notice. One is a huge, oblong mound of earth, 

about fifty feet high, with steep sides supported 

by stone walls. It has been called the Fortress, but 

there are now no traces of defensive ramparts, and it 

may have been raised for a palace or, more probably, for 

some religious purpose. That it was a natural hill seems 

unlikely. There are no remains on it of any large and 

solid building and in the middle there is now a hollow, its 

bottom filled with water, which is said to have been dug 

out by those who have excavated here, in old days for 

treasure, and more recently for archaeological purposes. 

Its vast proportions and the fine cutting of the stones 

which are placed along the edges are evidences of the 

great amount of labour employed upon it. 

A little below the mound are the remains of a broad 

staircase of long, low steps of sandstone, well cut, standing 

between two pillars of hard diorite rock. These led up 

to a platform, on which a temple may have stood. The 

proportions of the staircase and the pillars are good, and 

the effect is not without stateliness. No fragments of the 

supposed temple remain, but on the platform there are 

many stone figures, some found on it, some brought from 

the ground beneath and placed here, heads of animals, 

condors and other birds, pumas and fishes, all forcibly, 

though rudely, carved. Still more notable is a human 

head surmounting a square pillar or pedestal. It is 

much damaged, and no wonder, for the Bolivian soldiers 

used it as a mark to shoot at; but though the execution 

is stiff, the head has a certain dignity. Two other 



146 SOUTH AMERICA 

human figures, sadly defaced, stand at the gate of the 
village churchyard, a mile away. The style of all these 
is said to bear some resemblance to the remarkable 
colossal figures found on Easter Island, which lies out 
in the Pacific, two thousand miles west of Chile, and 
which are evidently the work of some race that in- 
habited that isle in ages of which no record remains. 

The most striking object, however, is the monolithic 
sculptured gateway, which now stands alone, the build- 
ing of which it formed a part having perished. It is 
hewn out of one block of dark grey trachytic rock, is 
ten feet high, the doorway or aperture four and a half 
feet high from the ground and two feet nine inches wide. 
Its top has been broken, whether by lightning, as the 
Indians say, or by its fall, or by the Spanish extirpators 
of idolatry, is not known. Thirty years ago it was lying 
prostrate. The front is covered with elaborate carvings 
in low relief , executed with admirable exactness and del- 
icacy, and owing their almost perfect preservation to the 
extreme hardness of the stone. They represent what 
may be either a divine or a royal head, surrounded by 
many small kneeling figures with animal heads, some 
human, some of the puma, some of the condor, these 
being the largest quadruped and the largest bird of prey 
in the Andes. The treatment is conventional and the 
symbolism obscure, for we have no clue to the religion 
of the people who built these monuments. The associa- 
tion of animal forms with deities is a familiar thing in 
many ancient mythologies, — human figures had animal 
heads in Egypt, and bulls and lions had human heads in 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES Ul 

Assyria, — so one may guess at something of the kind 
in Peruvian mythology. But these sculptures are un- 
like anything else in South America, or in the Old 
World, and bear only a faint resemblance to some of 
the figures in Central American temples. 1 This sculp- 
tured portal, the unique record of a long-vanished art 
and worship, perhaps of a long-vanished race, makes an 
impression which remains fresh and clear in memory, 
because it appeals to one's imagination as the single 
and solitary voice from the darkness of a lost past. 

All over the flat valley bottom there lie scattered 
huge hewn blocks, some of the sandstone which is 
here the underlying rock, some of andesite apparently 
brought on balsas from quarries many miles away 
(when perhaps the lake water came up this far. I meas- 
ured one massive prostrate stone lying near the stair- 
case and found it to be thirty-four feet long by five 
feet wide with one and one-half feet out of the ground. 
How much there was below ground could not be ascer- 
tained. Yet the stones that remain to-day scattered 
over a space more than a mile long are few compared to 
those which have during centuries past been carried 
away. The church and many of the houses in the vil- 
lage are built of them. The Cathedral and other edifices 
in La Paz have been built of them, and within the last 
ten years five hundred train-loads of them were carried 
off by the constructors of the railway to build bridges, 

1 They have some likeness to the carved stone found at Chavin 
in northern Peru, figured in Sir C. Markham's The Incas of Peru, 
p. 34. There was also found lately in a grave near Lima a textile 
fabric with a pattern resembling this. 



148 SOUTH AMERICA 

station houses, and what not, along the line. It is piti- 
able to think that this destruction of the most remark- 
able prehistoric monument in the western world should 
have been consummated in our own days. 

Whether there was ever a city at Tiahuanaco there is 
nothing to shew. The place may have been merely a 
sanctuary or, perhaps, a royal fortress and place of wor- 
ship combined. If there was ever a population of the 
humble class, they lived in mud huts which would 
quickly disappear and leave no trace. The modern 
village is composed of such huts, with some of the 
stones of the ruins used as foundations. Neverthe- 
less the size of the church and its unusually rich 
decoration, and its handsome silver altar, suggest that 
the place was formerly more important than it is to- 
day. Pottery and small ornaments are still found in 
the earth, though the treasures, if ever there were any, 
have been carried off long ago. An arrow point of 
obsidian, which an Indian shewed me, was interesting 
as evidence that the ancient inhabitants used bows and 
were not, as apparently were the Peruvians of Cuzco, 
content with slings as missile weapons. 1 

The valley is fertile, and much of it cultivated, but at 
this season, before the crops had begun to pierce the 
earth, it was very dreary. The brown hills all around are 
themselves bare and featureless, and they cut off the 
view of the snowy Cordillera and of the lake. The sight 

1 The arrow point may however have been brought from the 
northeastern shores of Titicaca. Mr. Bingham tells me that such 
obsidian tips are sometimes found in auriferous gravels there. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 149 

of this mass of ruins, where hardly one stone is left upon 
another in a place where thousands of men must have 
toiled and many thousands have worshipped, makes its 
melancholy landscape all the more doleful. It recalls 
the descriptions in the Hebrew prophets of the desola- 
tion coming upon Nineveh. 

Aymara tradition, with its vague tales of giants who 
reared the mound and walls and of a deity who in dis- 
pleasure turned the builders into stones and for a while 
darkened the world, has nothing more to tell us than the 
aspect of the place suggests, viz., that here dwelt a people 
possessed of great skill in stone work and obeying 
rulers who had a great command of labour, and that this 
race has vanished, leaving no other trace behind. Upon 
one point all observers and all students are agreed. 
When the first Spanish conquerors came hither, they 
were at once struck by the difference between these 
works and those of the Incas which they had seen at 
Cuzco and elsewhere in Peru. The Indians whom they 
questioned told them that the men who built these 
things had lived long, long before their own forefathers. 
Who the builders were, whence they came, how and 
when and whither they disappeared — of all this the 
Indians knew no more than the Spaniards themselves 
knew, or than we know now. The width of the inter- 
val between the greatness of Tiahuanaco and the Con- 
quest appears also by the fact that the Inca sovereigns 
had not treated it as a sacred spot in the way they did 
the shrine at Copacavana or the islands in Titicaca, nor 
has it to-day any special sanctity to the Indians of 



150 SOUTH AMERICA 

the neighbourhood. To them it is only what the Pyra- 
mids are to a wandering Arab or Stonehenge to a Wilt- 
shire peasant. The one thing which the walls have 
in common with those in and around Cuzco is the 
excellence of the stonework. The style of building is 
different, but the cutting itself is equally exact and 
regular. This art would seem to have arisen early 
among the races of the plateau, doubtless because the 
absence of wood turned artistic effort towards ex- 
cellence in stone. 

One receives the impression here, as in some other 
parts of Peru, that the semi-civilization, if we may 
call it so, of these regions is extremely ancient. We 
seem to look back upon a vista whose length it is 
impossible to conjecture, a vista of many ages, during 
which this has been the home of peoples already emerged 
from such mere savagery as that in which the natives 
of the Amazonian forests still he. But how many ages 
the process of emergence occupied, and how many 
more followed down to the Spanish Conquest we may 
never come to know. 

It is possible that immigrants may at some time, long 
subsequent to the colonization of America by way of 
Behring's Sea, have found their way hither across the 
waters of the Pacific. The similarity of the figures on 
Easter Island to the figures at Tiahuanaco has been 
thought to suggest such a possibility. Those figures are, 
I believe, unlike anything in any other Pacific island. 

Archaeological research, however, does not suggest, 
any more than does historical enquiry, the existence of 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 151 

any external influence affecting the South American 
races. We may reasonably assume that among them, 
as in Europe, the contact and intermixture of different 
stocks and types of character and culture made for 
advancement. But this great factor in the progress of 
mankind, which did so much for western Asia and 
Europe, and to the comparative absence of which the 
arrested civilization of China may be largely due, was 
far less conspicuously present in South America than on 
the Mediterranean coasts. Think what Europe owed 
not only to the mixture of stocks whence the Italo- 
Hellenic peoples sprang, but also to influences radiating 
out from Egypt and the West Asiatic nations. Think 
what Italy owed to Greece and afterwards to the 
East and of what modern European nations owe to 
the contact of racial types in literature, art, and ideas, 
such as the Celtic, the Iberian, the Teutonic, and the 
Slavonic. How different was the lot of the Peruvians, 
shut in between an impassable ocean on the west, a 
desert on the south, and the savage tribes of a forest 
wilderness on the east ! No ideas came to them from 
without, nor from any of the inventions which Old 
World peoples had been making could they profit. 
They were out of contact even with the most ad- 
vanced of the other American peoples, such as those 
of Bogota and Yucatan, for there was a vast space 
between, many shadowy mountains and a resounding 
sea. 

As after these ruins I saw no others in South Amer- 
ica, for neither southern Bolivia nor Chile nor Argen- 



152 SOUTH AMERICA 

tina, nor Uruguay has any to shew, this seems the 
fittest place for such few thoughts on the ancient civili- 
zation of South America as are suggested to the trav- 
eller's mind by the remains of it which he sees and by 
what he reads in the books of historians and archaeolo- 
gists. A large part of the interest which Peru and 
Bolivia have for the modern world is the interest which 
this ancient civilization awakens. It is a unique chap- 
ter in the history of mankind. 

1 The most distinct and constantly recurring impres- 
sions made by the remains is this : that the time when 
man began to rise out of mere savagery must, in these 
countries, be carried very far into the past. Our data 
for any estimate either of the duration of the process by 
which he attained a sort of civilization or of the several 
steps in it, are extremely scanty. In the Old World the 
early use of writing by a few of its peoples enables us 
to go a long way back. The records which Egypt and 
Babylon and China have been made to yield are of some 
service for perhaps three or even four thousand years — 
some would say more — before the Christian era, and 
from those of Egypt and Babylon we get at least 
glimpses of the races that lived in Asia Minor and along 
the Mediterranean coast. But none of the American 
peoples advanced as far as the invention of even the 
rudest form of writing, though in Mexico and Yucatan 
pictures were to some slight extent used to preserve 
the memory of events. Here, in South America, where 
neither writing nor pictures aid us, our only data for 
what may be called prehistoric history, are first, the re- 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 153 

mains of buildings, whether fortresses or palaces or 
temples, and, secondly, works of art, such as carvings^ 
ornaments, or religious objects, utensils of wood or earth- 
enware and paintings on them, weapons of war, woollen 
or cotton fabrics, such as ponchos or mummy-cloths. 
All such relics are more abundant in Peru than any- 
where else in the Western world, except that in Yucatan 
and some parts of Central America the ruined temples 
have been preserved better than here. The Peruvian 
relics are found not only in the Andean plateau, but 
also in those parts near the coast of northern Peru 
where cultivation was rendered possible by rivers. 
There, at the ruins of the Chimu city, near Truxillo, and 
farther south at Pachacamac, near Lima, a great deal 
has been obtained by excavation in ancient cemeteries 
and temples ; and much more would have been obtained 
but for the damage wrought by generations of treasure 
seekers who melted down all the gold they found and 
destroyed nearly everything else. 

The objects found on the coast differ in style from 
those found on the high Andean regions, and among 
these latter there are also marked differences between 
things found at Cuzco, and generally in northern Peru, 
and things found in the tombs and graves in the Titi- 
caca regions. All, however, have a certain family re- 
semblance and form a distinct archaeological group 
somewhat nearer to Mexican and Central American 
art than to anything in the Old World. Specimens 
of all can be just as well studied in the museums of 
Europe and North America as here on the spot, where 



154 SOUTH AMERICA 

the collections are neither numerous nor well arranged 
There is, perhaps, more fertility of invention, more free- 
dom of treatment and more humour in the objects found 
on the coast at Chimu and Pachacamac than in any 
others ; but the most impressive of all are the sculptures 
of Tiahuanaco. 

Considerable skill had been attained in weaving. 
Handsome woollen ponchos, apparently designed for 
use as religious vestments, have been found, the colour 
patterns harmonious and the wool exquisitely fine. The 
Chimu tapestries and embroideries shew taste as well as 
technical skill. Copper, the metal chiefly used in Peru, 
was mined and smelted in large quantities; and the 
reduction of silver ores was also understood, yet the 
age of stone implements was not past, either for peace- 
ful or for warlike purposes. As no cementing material 
had been discovered, walls were rendered exceptionally 
strong either by carefully fitting their stones into one 
another or fly clamping them together by metal. Of 
this latter method there are examples at Tiahuanaco. 

Taking Peruvian art as a whole, as it appears in 
pottery and pictures and carvings, it is inferior in grace 
of form and refinement of execution both to Egyptian 
and to early Greek work, such as that of the Mycenaean 
period. Neither is there anything that shews such a 
power of drawing the human figure and of designing 
ornament as the ruined temples of Yucatan display. 

The most signal excellence the Peruvians attained 
seems to have been in building. The absence of wood 
turned their efforts towards stone, and gave birth to 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 155 

works which deserve to be compared with those of Egypt, 
and far surpass in solidity any to be found in North 
America. Of the temples, too little remains to enable 
a judgment to be formed, either of their general de- 
sign or of their adornment. But the stonework is 
wonderful, indicating not only a high degree of manual 
expertness, but the maintenance of a severe standard 
of efficiency through every part, while the skill shewn 
in the planning of fortifications so as to strengthen 
every defensive line and turn to account the natural 
features of the ground would have done credit to the 
military engineering of fifteenth-century Europeans. 

But the race was also in some ways strangely inept. 
Both the Quichua tribes and the subjects of the Chimu 
sovereign on the Pacific coast seem to have shewn no 
higher invention than the Aymaras, who launched their 
rush balsas on Lake Titicaca, for the Spaniards found 
them using nothing but small canoes on the rivers 
and clumsy rafts for creeping along the shore with the 
help of a rude sail, though the Caribs of Venezuela, 
otherwise far less advanced, carried on a brisk trade in 
large sea-going canoes all the way along the line of the 
Antilles from the mouth of the Orinoco to the peninsula 
of Yucatan. 

The few songs that have been preserved do not com- 
memorate events or achievements like the ballads 
of Europe, but are mostly simple ditties, connected with 
nature and agriculture. There were, however, dramas 
which used to be acted, and among them one consider- 
able work which, long preserved by oral recitations, was 



156 SOUTH AMERICA 

written down in the seventeenth century by Dr. Valdez, 
a Spaniard, the priest of Sicuani, and generally held 
to be in the main of native authorship, though per- 
haps touched up by Spanish taste. This is the so- 
called drama of Ollantay. It has a fresh simplicity and 
a sort of romantic flavour which suggest that there was 
something more than prosaic industry in this people. 

In the absence of literature, one seeks in the mythol- 
ogy of a race a test of its imaginative quality ; and in its 
religion, an indication of its power of abstract thinking. 
In both respects, the Peruvians seem to have stood as 
much below the primitive Celts and Teutons, as they 
stood above the negro races, with their naive animism 
and childish though often humorous fables. Whether 
the Spanish ecclesiastics were right in finding in the 
worship of the earth god Pachacamac a belief in a su- 
preme deity, creator of the world, may be doubted. 
But that the worship of Sun, Moon, and Stars should 
have coexisted with ancestor worship, and with a sort 
of fetichism which revered and feared spirits in all 
objects, need excite no surprise. Such a mixture, or 
rather such a coexistence without real intermixture, 
of different strata of religious ideas, finds plenty of 
analogies in the ancient Helleno-Italic world as it does 
to-day in China and other parts of the East. There was 
a worship of the ghosts of the progenitors of the fam- 
ily and the tribe, a worship of various more or less 
remarkable natural objects, or rather of the spirits that 
dwelt in them, a worship of animals such as the strongest 
beast and largest bird of prey, the puma and the con- 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 157 

dor, and of the supremely useful llama (a devotion which 
was compatible with the sacrificing of the animal), a 
worship of plants, and especially of the maize and of 
the power which bade it grow, the Maize Mother. 
Above all these forms, congenial to the humbler classes, 
rose the worship of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (especially 
the Pleiades), representing a higher range of ideas, yet 
connected with the more primitive nature superstitions 
by the sense that the Sun evoked life from the earth 
and by the finding, in the constellations, the shapes of 
the animals that were sacred on the earth. Nor were 
these the only points in which we discover resem- 
blances to Old World religions. Peru rivalled Egypt 
in the care taken to preserve the bodies of the dead as 
mummies, 1 and these, so skilfully dried as not to offend 
the senses, were sometimes placed in their dwellings. The 
Quichuas practised divination by the flight of birds (like 
the Dyaks of Borneo), and by the inspection of the en- 
trails of victims, as the Romans did down to the end of 
the Republic. They had oracles d elivered from rocks or 
rivers, like the Greeks, and the Huillca through whom 
the spirit spoke could, like the Delphic Pythia, some- 
times be guided towards the answer desired. Men, 
and especially children, were sacrificed (though to a 
far smaller extent than in Mexico or among the Phoeni- 
cians). If cannibalism existed on the Plateau, it was 
rare, though it still remains among some of the wildest 
of the Amazonian tribes. 

1 The primitive inhabitants of the Canary Isles, who were ap- 
parently of Berber stock, also preserved their dead as mummies. 



158 SOUTH AMERICA 

That there is nothing of which men are so tenacious 
as their superstitions may perhaps be ascribed to the 
fact that life is ruled more by emotion and habit than 
by reason. The Peruvians made no fight for their 
religion, which, to be sure, was not necessarily incon- 
sistent with such Christian rites as the friars demanded. 
They submitted to baptism with that singular passivity 
which marks nearly all the South American races. 
They threw into the lakes or hid in the ground all the 
temple gold that could be got away before the Spanish 
plunderers fell upon them, but made little attempt to 
defend their sacred places or images. Nevertheless 
under a nominal, not to say a debased, Christianity, 
they long continued to practise the ancient rites, and 
to this day wizardry and the devotion to the local 
huacas (sacred places or objects) are strong among 
the people. These primeval superstitions, which ex- 
isted long before the Inca Sun worship had been 
established, have long survived it. If all the people who 
now speak Spanish were to depart from Peru and Bo- 
livia, and these regions were to be cut off from the world 
and left to themselves, pagan worship, mixed with some 
few Christian words and usages, might probably again 
become, within some twenty generations, the religion of 
the Andean countries, just as tribes in the Caucasus which 
were converted to Christianity in the days when the 
Roman Empire reached as far east as Tiflis were found 
to have retained of it, after twelve centuries, nothing but 
the practice of fasting in Lent and the use of the sign of 
the cross. Nature worship still holds its ground, though 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 159 

no doubt in a highly extenuated form, in every country 
of Europe. 1 Habit and emotion are the most universal 
and the deepest-down things in human nature, present 
where reason is feeble, and gripping the soul tighter 
than do any intellectual convictions. Religious senti- 
ment may hold men to old beliefs and practices long after 
the origin and grounds of the belief have been forgotten. 
Comparing the Indians of the Andes with those of the 
plateau of Anahuac, and especially with the Aztecs, 
the former appear a less vigorous and forceful people, 
and distinctly inferior as fighting men. The North 
Americans generally, including not only the Mexicans, 
but such tribes as the Sioux, the Comanches, and the 
Iroquois, loved war, and were as brave and fierce in it 
as any race the world has seen. The South Americans, 
except of course the Araucanians of Chile, the Charruas 
of Uruguay, and perhaps also the Caras of Quito, were 
altogether softer. They still make sturdy soldiers when 
well led, and do not fear death. But they shewed little 
of the spirit and tenacity of the Red Men of the North. 
Even allowing for the terror and amazement inspired by 
the horses, the firearms, the armour, and the superior 
physical strength of the Spanish invaders, who were 
picked men, some of them veterans from Italian wars, 

1 Abundant evidence on this subject may be found in Mr. 
J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough. In Cornwall and Ireland sacred wells 
still receive offerings. I once met a French peasant who believed 
in were-wolves and knew one ; and I remember as a boy to have 
been warned by the peasants in the Glens of Antrim to beware of the 
water spirit who (under the form of a bull) infested the river in 
which I was fishing. 



160 SOUTH AMERICA 

the resistance of the Peruvians was strangely feeble. 
They were also mentally inferior. The Spaniards 
thought the Mexicans far more intelligent. Neither race 
had made the great discovery of alphabetic writing, but 
those of Anahuac had come much nearer to it with their 
quasi-hieroglyphic pictures than had the Peruvians with 
their Quipus, knotted strings of various colours. On 
the other hand the rule of the Incas and their more 
pacific type of civilization represent a more fully de- 
veloped and better settled system of administration than 
the military organization of those allied pueblos which 
were led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). 
These latter did no more than exact tribute and re- 
quire contingents in war from the tribes who dwelt 
round them on the Mexican plateau and between the 
plateau and the Gulf, while the Incas not only ex- 
ercised undisputed suzerainty for a thousand miles 
to the south of Cuzco and nearly another thousand 
to the north, but had devised, in their own domain of 
central Peru, a scheme of government whose elabo- 
ration witnesses to the political capacity of the rulers. 
Even if we discount a good deal of the description given 
by the early writers of the " State Socialism " established 
by the Incas, it seems probable that more was done in 
the way of regulating the productive activities of the 
subjects than in any other primitive people, either of 
the ancient or of the modern world. Public officials, 
it is said, regulated the distribution and cultivation of 
the land, its produce being allotted, partly to the Inca, 
partly to the service of the Sun, his temples and minis- 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 161 

ters, partly to the cultivator or the clan to which he 
belonged. Thus State Socialism was strengthened by- 
its association with a State Church, and as everybody 
was free to worship his local huacds as well as the Sun 
there was nothing to fear from heresy or non-conformity. 
The Incas maintained roads, some of which are said to 
have been paved, 1 and tambos or rest-houses along 
the roads, together with a service of swift messengers 
whose feats of running excited the admiration of the 
Spaniards. They made plans in relief of their cities, 
and some accounts declare that they adorned their 
walls with pictures of former sovereigns. By the gen- 
eral testimony of the early Spanish writers, the coun- 
try was peaceful and orderly. Other vices, including 
that of drunkenness, are charged upon them, but theft 
and violence were extremely rare. Indeed, the habit 
of obedience was cultivated only too successfully, for it 
made them yield, after a few scattered outbursts of 
resistance, to a handful of invaders. 

The political astuteness of the Incas, visible in their 
practice of moving conquered tribes, as did the Assyrian 
kings, to new abodes and replacing these by colonists 
of more assured loyalty, was perhaps most conspicuous 
in the success that attended their scheme of basing 
imperial power upon national Sun worship, making the 
sovereign play on earth the part which the great 
luminary held in the sky, and surrounding his commands 

1 It is, however, probable that the early Spanish accounts of the 
excellence of the roads were exaggerated, for few traces of them 
can be discerned to-day. 



162 SOUTH AMERICA 

and his person with an almost equal sanctity. The 
Inca was more to his subjects than any European or Asi- 
atic monarch has ever been to his, more than was the 
Mikado in Japan or the Czar to the peasantry of Russia 
a century ago. 

When the Spanish invasion broke like a tornado 
upon Peru, it was natural that the Inca throne should 
be uprooted and the ancient Sun worship with it. But 
the Conquerors also therewith destroyed, in the thought- 
less insolence of force and greed, the whole system of 
society and government. Some of them, writing twenty 
or thirty years later, expressed their regret. 1 Wretch- 
edness had replaced prosperity; such virtues as the 
people had possessed were disappearing, their spirit 
was irretrievably broken. The serfdom to which the 
peasantry were by the Conquest subjected was not 
paternal, as that of the Incas had been, and was harsher, 
because the new master was a stranger without sym- 
pathy or compassion. There was no one to befriend 
the Indian, save now and then a compassionate church- 
man; and even if he could get the ear of the Viceroy or 
bring his appeal to the Council of the Indies in Spain, 
the oppressor on the spot was always able to frustrate 
such benevolent efforts. How far the people died out 
under these new conditions is matter of controversy, 
but it seems clear that the coast valleys (already 
declining as the result of frequent wars) were soon 
almost depopulated; and in place of the eight millions 
whom the Viceroy Toledo's enumeration reported in 

1 See note III at end of book. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 163 

1575, * there were in 1794 only 608,000 Indians and 
244,000 mestizos within the seven Intendancies of Peru 
(excluding what is now Bolivia). 

It is the extraordinary interest of the subject, — a re- 
ligion and a polity resembling in so many points those 
of Old World countries, yet itself altogether indepen- 
dently developed — that has drawn me into this digres- 
sion, for all that I had intended was to describe the 
impression which the existing ruins make, and what it 
is that they seem to tell us about the capacities of the 
race that has left them as its monument. They are far 
scantier than are the remains of the Egyptian and 
Assyrian civilizations, and they are as inferior in ma- 
terial grandeur and artistic quality to those remains as 
the race was intellectually inferior not only to the 
Greeks, but also to our own early Celtic and Teutonic 
ancestors of the first five Christian centuries who 
produced few buildings and had not advanced in set- 
tled order and in wealth so far as the subjects of the 
Incas. Nevertheless, the Peruvian remains do bear 
witness to two elements of strength in the American 
race. One of these is a capacity for the concentration 
of effort upon any aim proposed and for a scrupu- 
lously exact and careful execution of any work un- 
dertaken. The other is a certain largeness and bold- 
ness of conception, finding expression not only in the 

1 It is not clear how much territory this enumeration covered and 
it was probably only a rough estimate ; still, the fact that the popu- 
lation was far larger in the middle of the sixteenth than it was in 
the eighteenth century seems beyond doubt. 



164 SOUTH AMERICA 

plan of great buildings, but also in an administrative 
system which secured obedience over a vast area, which 
diffused its language over many diverse tribes, and im- 
pressed upon them one worship and (to some extent at 
least) one type of society. That a people who wanted so 
many advantages possessed by the peoples of the Old 
World should have effected these things shews the high 
natural quality inherent in some at least of the aborigi- 
nal races of the Western Hemisphere. 

Was this semicivilization of Peru — and one may 
ask the same question regarding that of Mexico — still 
advancing when it was suddenly and irretrievably swept 
away by the Spanish Conquest ? Did it possess such 
further possibilities of development as might have 
enabled it, had it been spared, to have made some sub- 
stantial contribution, whether in art, or in industry, or in 
the way of intellectual creation, to the general progress 
of mankind ? Or had it already reached the full meas- 
ure of its stature, as the civilization of Egypt seems 
to have done some time before the Persians conquered 
that country, or as that of China did many centuries 
ago ? This is a question which the knowledge so far 
attained regarding the pre-Conquest ages of Peru does 
not enable us to answer. 1 Could the voyage of Colum- 
bus have been postponed for four or five hundred years, 
Peruvians and Mexicans might have risen nearer to an 

1 A vast deal still remains to be done both in Mexico and Peru, 
perhaps even more in the latter than in the former, to examine 
thoroughly both the accounts given by the early Spanish writers and 
the existing remains of buildings and graves and the objects found 
in or near them, so as to lay a foundation for some systematic ac- 
count of the ancient native civilizations. 



LAKE TITICACA AND CENTRAL ANDES 165 

equality of intelligence with the European peoples, how- 
ever inferior they had remained for the purposes of war. 
But America once discovered, the invasion of Mexico 
and Peru was certain to follow ; and so soon as the Old- 
World races with their enormous superiority poured in 
among those of the New World, the weaker civiliza- 
tion could not but be submerged, submerged so ut- 
terly that little or nothing of it remained to be taken 
up into and incorporated with that of the invaders. 

It is this complete submersion that strikes one so 
forcibly in Peru and Mexico; perhaps even more 
forcibly in the former than in the latter. The aborigines 
went under at once. In Peru and Bolivia they consti- 
tute the majority of the population. But to the moral, 
intellectual, and political life of Peru and Bolivia they 
have made no contribution. Even to its art and its in- 
dustries they supplied nothing except painstaking artifi- 
cers, retaining the old talent for stonework, which they 
did at the bidding of Spanish masters. Negatively and 
harmfully, they have affected politics by preventing the 
growth of a white agricultural class and by furnishing 
recruits to the armies raised by military adventurers. 
The break between the old Peru of the Incas and the 
newer Peru of colonial times was as complete as it was 
sudden. The earlier has passed on nothing to the later, 
because the spirit of the race was too hopelessly broken 
to enable it to give anything. There remains only the 
submissiveness of a downtrodden peasantry and its 
pathetic fidelity to its primitive superstitions. Some 
old evils passed away, some new evils appeared. Human 
sacrifices ended, and the burning of heretics began. 



CHAPTER V 

LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 

Bolivia was for two centuries after the Spanish Con- 
quest a part of Peru and has neither natural bounda- 
ries nor any distinctive physical character to mark it 
off from its neighbours, Peru on the northwest and 
Argentina on the southeast. It is an artificial creation, 
whose separate national existence is due to two events. 
After the Jesuits had, by the king of Spain's decree in 
1769, been forced out of Paraguay, which they had ruled 
with considerable success for many years, the Spanish 
government found that it was more and more difficult 
to administer from Lima their vast southeastern domin- 
ions lying to the east of the Andes, since these were 
then becoming more and more exposed to contact with 
European nations, reaching them across the Atlantic. 
Accordingly, they created, in 1776, the viceroyalty of 
Buenos Aires and assigned to it all the River Plate 
countries, while for the southeastern parts of what had 
hitherto been upper Peru they set up a separate admin- 
istrative authority with the seat of its audiencia at Chu- 
quisaca. Then came the War of Independence. When 
that struggle ended with the decisive battle of Ayacucho, 
in 1824, and the surrender of Lima and Callao, the 
triumphant revolutionary leaders determined to main- 
tain the political separation from Peru of this south- 

166 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 167 

em region, which had been under the audiencia of 
Chuquisaca, and to constitute a distinct republic lying 
between Peru and Argentina. To this new creation the 
name of Bolivia was given in honour of Simon Bolivar, 
the " Liberator," himself a Venezuelan. Independent 
it has since then remained, having, however, lost in an 
unfortunate war with Chile a large slice of territory ad- 
joining the Pacific. It is now, except Paraguay, the 
only entirely inland state in South America. And just 
as on no side has it anything that can be called a natu- 
ral frontier, neither have its inhabitants any distinctive 
quality or character to distinguish them sharply from 
other peoples. They differ but little from the Andean 
Peruvians, being of similarly mixed Spanish and Indian 
blood and living under similar physical conditions. 

Bolivia includes several regions quite different in 
their character. Nearly all the western part is a desert, 
with a few mining towns scattered here and there, a 
desert enclosed by the two great almost parallel Cordil- 
leras of the Andes. The southeastern part is a plateau, 
or rather succession of plateaux, lying on the eastern 
side of the Eastern Cordillera, and gradually sinking 
into those vast levels on the borders of Argentina, Para- 
guay, and Brazil, from which rivers flow northward into 
the Amazon and southward to form the Parana and Rio 
de la Plata. Much of this region is too dry or too rugged 
for cultivation or even for ranching. Yet much is also 
valuable for one or other purpose, and capable of sup- 
porting an agricultural population as well as that which 
lives off the mines. The third or northeastern region 



168 SOUTH AMERICA 

is a part of the great Amazonian low forest-covered 
country, — the so-called Selvas (woodlands), — which 
stretches out to the east from the declivities of the 
Eastern Cordillera, and is still, save for a few white 
settlements, inhabited only by wild Indians. Thus in 
the enormous total area of Bolivia, 605,000 square miles, 
there are only 2,000,000 people, and the large majority 
of these are Indians, uncivilized in the forests, semicivil- 
ized in the other regions. The white population, esti- 
mated at 200,000, most of whom, however, have some 
Indian blood, is virtually confined to a few towns, only 
one of which, La Paz, has more than 25,000 people. 
Santa Cruz (de la Sierra), far out in the eastern lowlands, 
and Chuquisaca, now called Sucre, Cochabamba, 
and Potosi, with its wonderful mountain of silver, have 
some families of Spanish blood. Oruro and Uyuni in 
the desert are mining towns with the mixed population 
that gathers in such places. La Paz, the largest city, 
and virtually, though not officially, the capital, has 
50,000 inhabitants, the bulk of whom are Indians. 
These six towns are far apart, there are few inhabitants 
between them, and these are nearly all Indians. Till 
the railroad from Uyuni by Oruro to La Paz was made, 
communication was very slow and difficult. Anyone 
can see what obstacles to economic and political prog- 
ress such conditions create. 

The traveller who approaches La Paz from Lake 
Titicaca — and this has been the usual route from the 
coast — rises slowly through the bare hills amidst which 
Tiahuanaco stands till he emerges on an immense level, 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 169 

stretching south to a distant horizon, and bounded on 
the west by bare rolling mountains and on the east by 
the still loftier Eastern Cordillera. Here in the bleak- 
est spot imaginable, about 13,000 feet above sea-level, 
the railway from Guaqui, the port on Titicaca, meets 
the railway from Antofagasta, the Chilean port on the 
Pacific, four hundred miles away to the south, and 
this is the point to which a third railway is now con- 
verging, that which is being built to connect La Paz 
with Arica on the Pacific, one hundred miles to the west. 
From this point, called Viacha, the route turns eastward 
towards the Cordillera, the line climbing slowly in wide 
sweeps over the dusty and shrubless plateau on whose 
thin grass sheep are browsing. There is not a house 
visible and the smooth slope seems to run right up 
against the mountain wall beyond. Where can La Paz 
be? asks the traveller. Presently, however, he perceives 
strings of llamas and donkeys and wayfarers on foot 
moving along the slope towards a point where they all 
suddenly vanish and are no more seen. Then a spot is 
reached where the railway itself seems to end between a 
few sheds. He gets out and walks a few yards to the east 
and then suddenly pulls up with a start on the edge of a 
yawning abyss. Right beneath him, fifteen hundred feet 
below, a grey, red-roofed city fills the bottom of a gorge 
and climbs up its sides on both banks of the torrent that 
foams through it. Every street and square, every yard 
and garden, is laid out under the eye as if on a map, and 
one almost seems to hear the rattle of vehicles over stony 
pavements coming faintly up through the thin air. 



170 SOUTH AMERICA 

I had often heard La Paz described as lying in a 
deep rift of volcanic origin, due to a sudden subsidence 
in the course of an eruption, or perhaps to an earth- 
quake. Such a hypothesis seemed natural in a land 
of earthquakes and volcanoes. But there is no trace 
here of any volcanic action, whether eruption or dis- 
ruption. This barranca — it is the Spanish name for 
such a hollow — has evidently been scooped out by the 
action of water. The sloping plateau up which the 
railway rises from Viacha is an immensely thick alluvial 
or lacustrine deposit of earth and gravel, doubtless 
formed in the days when the whole region between 
the Eastern and Western Cordilleras formed part of 
a far larger Lake Titicaca. The torrent which comes 
down from the snows of the Cordillera Real to the north 
has cut its way down through this deposit and thus 
formed the "gulch," to use the word which, in western 
North America, is appropriated to gorges hollowed out 
by streams. The sides of the hollow are all of earth, 
extremely hard, and in many places almost precipitous, 
but there is no rock, certainly no igneous rock, visible 
anywhere. 

How did so strange a site come to be chosen ? Appar- 
ently in the first instance because gold had been found 
in the earth along the river, and the Spaniards set 
the Indians to wash it out for them. This industry has 
long been abandoned; but the spot, first settled in or 
about 1548, when the civil wars among the Conquista- 
dores were ended by capture and execution of Gonzalo 
Pizarro, and called Our Lady of Peace, was recom- 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 171 

mended for continued occupation by its having a copi- 
ous and perennial stream, by its sheltered position, and 
by its standing at the opening of a deep ravine through 
which a track leads down along the banks of the 
river, into the forest country on the east. Through 
this ravine it is supposed that Lake Titicaca formerly 
sent its surplus waters to the Atlantic. No spot within 
many a mile is so well protected from the fierce winds 
that sweep over the plateau. Up there nothing will 
rise three feet from the ground. Down below flowers 
are grown and trees can be coaxed up to give shade 
and put forth branches in which birds can sing. 

From the edge of the barranca — it is called the "Alto " 
— electric cars descend into the city by a track which 
doubles hither and thither in zigzags along the face 
of the almost precipitous declivity. The line has been 
skilfully laid out, and as the cars are light and fitted 
with powerful brakes, the descent is perfectly safe, steep 
as is the grade. Such a railway is, of course, not capa- 
ble of carrying heavy goods traffic ; but there is not, 
and may not for a long while be, any great quantity of 
heavy traffic to carry. The new line, which is to con- 
nect the city with the coast at Arica, is meant to have 
its terminal station at the southern end of the barranca, 
where descent from above is somewhat easier. 

La Paz has the distinction of being the loftiest capital 
city in the world, as it stands 12,470 feet above sea- 
level, more than 2000 feet higher than Quito, and 5000 
feet higher than Mexico. Lhasa in Tibet comes next 
to it at 11,830 feet. The mean annual temperature is 



172 SOUTH AMERICA 

50 degrees Fahrenheit. The keen air which this ele- 
vation gives has a fine, bracing quality, yet there are 
disadvantages. One is never warm except when actu- 
ally in the sunlight, and there are no fires, indeed, hardly 
any fireplaces, partly, no doubt, because there is nothing 
to burn, the country being treeless and coal far distant. 
The inhabitants get accustomed to these conditions 
and shiver in their ponchos, but the traveller is rather 
wretched after sunset, and feels how natural was Sun 
worship in such a country. So thin is the air that 
people with weak hearts or narrow chests cannot live 
here. An attack of pneumonia is rapidly fatal, because 
there is not enough oxygen to keep the lungs going under 
stress, and the only chance for the patient is to hurry 
him down to the coast by railway. Pressure on the 
breathing and palpitation of the heart are the commonest 
symptoms of the soroche, or puna, the so-called moun- 
tain sickness which prevails all over the plateau at 
heights exceeding 10,000 feet, many persons suffering 
from it at even lower levels. Less frequent symptoms 
are nausea and vomiting, violent headache, and general 
disturbance of the digestive organs. Some constitu- 
tions are, of course, much more liable to suffer than others 
are, but all who come from the lowlands experience a 
difficulty in any violent physical exertion, such as 
running uphill or lifting heavy weights. We enquired 
before leaving the coast whether any remedies or pre- 
ventives could be applied, and were told that drugs 
were of little or no use, the best prophylactic being to 
abstain from smoking, from drinking, and from eating. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 173 

I observed only the second of these directions, but neither 
of us suffered in any way, not even at heights exceeding 
15,000 feet, save that it proved desirable in climbing hills 
to walk more slowly than we were accustomed to do at 
home, and that, when lying down in bed at night, we 
found ourselves drawing a few very long and deep 
breaths before sleep came. English and North Ameri- 
can acquaintances in La Paz told us that to play single 
sets in lawn tennis was too hard work, because the 
effort of getting quickly to different corners of the court 
tried the lungs ; and we heard of people who, having come 
here for business purposes, found, after a few months, 
that it was prudent to return to the coast for an interval 
of rest. The native Indians, being to the manner born, 
seem to suffer from the thinness of the air no more than 
they do from the cold, and in the days of the Incas they 
performed extraordinary feats, of swift running for long 
distances. 

The causes which make elevation above the sea affect 
our organs more on some mountains than on others have 
never been fully ascertained. Sir M. Conway thinks 
that the rarity of air is more felt in dry regions, as here 
in the central Andes and in Colorado, where I personally 
remember to have found it a greater hindrance to exer- 
tion at 8000 feet than on the Alps at 15,000 feet. Others 
declare that it is more severe in moist and rainy weather 
than in clear weather. One may venture to suggest 
that it is more felt on a plateau or wide mass of lofty 
mountains than on a narrow range where there is abun- 
dance of denser air just below, which rises from the 



174 SOUTH AMERICA 

valley. This would explain why climbers suffer so 
little from it in the Alps. Such experience as I have 
had on the Himalayas and in America as well as on 
the North American ranges and in Hawaii favours this 
view. 

The lesson of slowing down one's pace in walking 
uphill is soon learnt in La Paz, for, as it stands on very 
irregular ground, sloping sharply on both sides to the 
stream which traverses it in a broad, stony channel, all 
the streets are steep, except those that run along the 
bottom of the valley parallel to the stream. All are 
very roughly paved, so driving is no great pleasure till 
you get outside the town upon one or two well-kept sub- 
urban avenues. Still less is riding, till one has learnt to 
trust the experienced local animal to keep his feet on 
the large, smooth cobblestones. In such a city, where 
there never were rich people and no church had any 
special sanctity, one cannot expect to find that charm, 
frequent in the old cities of Spain, which arises from the 
variety of architectural detail in the buildings. Few in 
La Paz bear an air of antiquity, few have anything 
picturesque in gables or doors or windows. The same 
thing is true of the churches also. Some have a more 
spacious interior than others, some a richer facade, some 
statelier towers, but all are of the invariable late six- 
teenth- and seventeenth-century type, with the same 
heavy and often tawdry ornament in the nave and 
choir. The churches of the friars have often more 
quality than the others ; and here San Francisco with 
its handsome front and elaborate reredos pleased us 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 175 

better than the Cathedral. There are a few good houses, 
some of which tradition allots to former governors, with 
galleries built round the patio and gateways surmounted 
by armorial bearings, but the patio is cheerless, for it 
is apt to be a reservoir of chilled air. The central Plaza, 
where one usually looks to find the best that a town 
can do, is here quite small, but tastefully laid out. On 
one side of it are the government offices, on another 
the seat of the legislature, not a bad building, if it were 
not surmounted by a zinc spire. The markets are the 
most interesting places, because here, as in the open-air 
booths of the Plaza San Francisco and still more in 
the large covered passages of the principal Mercado 
(much like an Oriental bazaar or the Suk at Tunis), 
one sees not only the various fruits and roots and 
grains, the scanty produce of the plateau and of the 
nearest warmer valleys, together with such textile 
fabrics as native industry weaves or embroiders, but 
also the natives themselves in all their variety of 
costume. The Indian wears a felt hat, and the mestizo 
(half-breed), who belongs to a higher social stratum, a 
straw one. The former has always, the latter often, a 
woollen poncho, brightly coloured, over his rough and 
dirty cotton shirt and short, loose trousers. The white 
man, or the mestizo of the upper class who considers 
himself to be white, wears a European cloth coat, and 
usually for warmth's sake a cloak or overcoat above 
it;- this is the distinctive note of social pretension. 
The native women are gorgeous in brilliantly coloured 
woollen petticoats, very heavy and very numerous. 



176 SOUTH AMERICA 

Orange and pink are the favourite colours. Strong and 
solidly built as these Indian women are, one wonders 
how their waists can support the weight of three, four, 
or even five of these thick pieces of closely woven cloth. 

Thus, though there is not much for the tourist to see 
or do, nor for the art student to admire, still La Paz 
is a picturesque place, with a character so peculiar that 
it makes for itself a niche in the memory and stays 
there, as being unlike any other place. The strange ir- 
regularity of the steep, rough streets with cliffs of brown 
earth standing up at the ends of them, the brawling 
torrent, the wild-looking Indians in their particoloured 
dresses, the flocks of graceful llamas with their long, 
curved necks and liquid, wondering eyes, the extraordi- 
nary situation of the city in this deep pit, deep but not 
dark, for the vertical sun blazes into it all day long ; and, 
above all, the magnificent snowy mass of Illimani, tower- 
ing into the sapphire blue sky with glaciers that seem to 
hang over the city though they are forty miles away, 
its three pinnacles of snow turning to a vivid rose 
under the departing sun, — all these together make 
La Paz a fascinating spot, one of those which flash 
quickly and vividly before the mind when you think 
of them. 

The outskirts of the city, too bare and stern for beauty, 
have a weird grimness which approaches grandeur. A 
pretty avenue between rows of Eucalyptus, the only tree 
that seems to thrive here, and which stands the frost 
better than it does in England, perhaps because Bolivia 
has a dry air and a strong sun which more nearly repro- 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 177 

duce the conditions of its Australian home, leads to a 
public park whence a splendid view of the surrounding 
heights and down the valley is obtained. The precipices 
of hard earth that enclose it have been here and there 
broken up into lofty earth pyramids like those which 
one sees near Botzen in Tyrol, and have doubtless 
been formed, like those, by the action of rain upon the 
softer parts of the cliff. Behind the eastern earth wall 
rise the spurs and buttresses of the Cordillera, wild, 
bare glens running up to the watershed of the chain, 
across the head of one of which is the pass which leads 
down into the forest Montana. It reminded me of some 
of the recesses among the Noric Alps behind Gastein, 
but was on a vaster scale, and more gloomy, as Andean 
landscapes usually are. Quitting the city on another 
side, I rode southward for some seven or eight miles 
along the road which leads down the gorge, by a long 
and devious course, through the heart of the Eastern 
Cordillera under the southern flanks of Illimani, into the 
land of gold and rubber, of alligators and jaguars. In the 
sheltered nooks at the lower end of the town there were 
gardens full of bamboos and flowering shrubs, and one 
met strings of llamas, mules, and donkeys coming up the 
road, laden with tropical fruits and other products of 
the Yungas, as this region is called. Farther down 
the scenery was stern and harsh, with great rock- 
masses, crowning slopes that rose steeply three or four 
thousand feet above the valley, but here and there 
where there was room for cultivation beside the river, 
a patch of bright green alfalfa relieved its monotony of 



178 SOUTH AMERICA 

brown and black — a weird country, with these sharp 
contrasts of heat and cold, of verdure and sterility. The 
air was already warm, and after thirty miles, one comes 
into the rains and the insects and the fevers of the 
tropics. 

Within the city there is little for a visitor to do except 
wander through the market and buy rugs made of the 
deliciously soft and warm wool of the vicuna, the finest 
and costliest of Andean skins. Neither is there much 
to see except the museum, which contains an interesting 
collection of minerals, specimens of woods, stuffed 
animals, and all sorts of curiosities, such as Indian weap- 
ons and various kinds of handiwork. As the rooms are 
far too small for their contents, these are not seen to 
advantage. The gentleman who seems to have the 
chief share in the management (Senor Ballivian) is a 
historical scholar and archaeologist of high repute, be- 
longing to one of the old families of La Paz. Such 
accomplishments are not common in Bolivia, yet there 
are few countries which offer a wider and more attrac- 
tive field to the naturalist and to the student of eth- 
nology. 

The legislature being in session, I was invited to 
be present at its sittings. Both houses are small in 
number and are composed chiefly of lawyers, as, in- 
deed, are most South American legislative bodies, law 
being the occupation which naturally leads to and 
comports with the profession of politics. On this 
particular occasion the proceedings were unexciting 
and the speeches conversational in tone. Members 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 179 

speak sitting, a practice which, though general in 
these republics, seems ill adapted for displays of that 
sonorous eloquence which belongs to the Spanish-Ameri- 
can temperament. Among the eminent citizens whom 
it was my good fortune to meet none impressed me 
more than the veteran General Pando, who has been 
president of the republic and might have been so again, 
had not his patriotism made him prefer to devote his 
energies to the organization of the Bolivian army, the 
smallness of which makes its efficiency all the more 
needful. Nobody in the country is more widely re- 
spected and trusted. 

There is a handful of foreign residents, German busi- 
ness men, English and North American railway men, a 
pleasant little society. The best school is said to be 
that conducted by a North American mission, which, 
however, devotes itself to education and not to prose- 
lytizing. Children of good Roman Catholic families 
attend it. 

That the educated] residents of Spanish stock should 
be few is not surprising when one realizes that La Paz 
is really an Indian city. Aymara is the language com- 
monly spoken by three-fourths or more of its inhabitants. 
It has probably a larger aboriginal population than any 
other city in the New World, though the percentage of 
Indians may be somewhat greater in Asuncion, the 
capital of Paraguay. This may be a fitting place to 
give a brief account of their present condition, since 
of what they seem to have been before the Conquest 
something has been said in the last preceding chapter. 



180 SOUTH AMERICA 

Though the bulk of the inhabitants of La Paz and 
Cuzco are Indians, the larger Andean towns are 
generally Spanish in appearance, and it is in the rural 
districts that the Indian is best seen and understood. 
He is essentially an agriculturist. Nearly all the land 
except in some coast plantations where a little Chinese 
or negro labour is employed is cultivated by the Indian, 
and all the llamas and sheep are herded by him. 
There is, indeed, no other industry by which a living 
can be made, except mining, for no factories on a large 
scale yet exist in these countries. Attached to the land, 
and dwelling usually in small villages which, save in 
fertile tracts like the Vilcamayu Valley, are seldom near 
together, the Indian has retained the beliefs and habits 
of his forefathers more than even the peasantry of 
Russia or the Turkish dominions. His primitive organi- 
zation, the ayllu or clan, composed, like the Roman gens, 
or perhaps rather like a Greek phratry, of persons who 
traced their descent to a supposed common ancestor, still 
subsists in Bolivia, though it has of late years been inter- 
fered with by a new kind of grouping, that of the tenants 
or labourers on the same finca (landed estate). A num- 
ber of ayllus made up a tribe, but this division has lost its 
importance since the cacique or chief of ancient times van- 
ished. In every Indian agricultural community there are 
two officials. One is the Jlacata, whose functions are ad- 
ministrative, including the division of the land each year 
between the persons who are to till it and the receipt of 
the crops from common land, and the supervision of 
common labour. The other is the Alcalde, who com- 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 181 

bines executive and judicial powers, maintaining order, 
deciding petty disputes, and leading in fighting if the 
need for fighting should arise. The peasant, though 
legally free, practically goes with the estate, and 
though legally a voter, practically does not vote, the 
government being kind enough to relieve the rural 
citizens, and frequently the urban ones also, from a 
duty which few of them are qualified to discharge. 
They are in some places oppressed by the landowners, — 
that one must expect where there is a great difference 
of race and capacity, — yet much less than in colonial 
days, for there have been Indian risings, and firearms 
are more largely in their hands than formerly. They 
so preponderate in numbers that any movement which 
united them against the upper class might, could they 
find a leader, have serious consequences. Thus the fear 
of trouble restrains the excesses of power. Those who 
have land of their own are said to fare as ill at the 
hands of the lawyer and money-lender as any tenant 
could do at those of a landlord. 

Scarcely any are educated. In Titicaca Island, with 
a population of about three hundred, there, was a 
few years ago only one man who could read. In all 
Bolivia only 30,000 children were in the schools out of 
a population of 2,000,000. The sparseness of the popu- 
lation makes the provision of instruction difficult ; nor 
do the aborigines seem to care for education, being so 
far satisfied with their lot as to have no notion of other 
pleasures than those which their fairs and festivals 
supply, and those derived from the use of alcohol at 



182 SOUTH AMERICA 

these festivals, and at all times of the coca leaf, which 
is for an Indian the first necessity of life. He is never 
without his bag containing a bundle of leaves, which he 
masticates (usually with a little clay) while walking or 
working, finding in them a support which enables him 
to endure fatigue without food for long periods. The 
leaf when chewed is tasteless, and whether taken thus 
or in a decoction produces no directly pleasurable feeling 
of stimulus. I have experimented with it in both 
forms without being able to discover any result except 
that of arresting hunger. Taken by chewing the leaf, as 
the Indians take it, it cannot have the highly deleterious 
effects of cocaine, which is a concentrated essence ; in- 
deed, if it had those effects, the aborigines of the plateau 
must have been long ago ruined by it. 1 Possibly there is 
something in the physical conditions of their life render- 
ing it comparatively or altogether innocuous. It does 
not seem to be much used by the whites, nor in the 
lowlands by any class of the population. Perhaps, 
therefore, it is "indicated" in the mild form of a chewed 
leaf, as a stimulant suitable to those who take continu- 
ous exertion at great altitudes. 

What has been said here refers generally to the aborig- 
ines of the high Andean regions, but there are two great 
divisions of them, the characteristics of which are not 
altogether the same. In very early times there were 
probably many diverse tribes, and every valley spoke 
a language, or at least a dialect, of its own. This 

1 Its habitual use may have contributed to give the Aymaras that 
impassive dulness which characterizes the race. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 183 

is still the case in the Montana region (the forests at the 
east foot of the Andes), where adjoining tribes are some- 
times wholly unlike one another in speech and aspect. 
The conquests of the Incas, with their levelling and unify- 
ing rule, effaced most of these distinctions. There was 
a tongue called Mochica spoken by the coast people 
of Chimu, the race to whose artistic talent reference 
was made in last chapter, which seems to have been 
quite unlike the speech of the plateau. It is now ex- 
tinct, but a grammar, made by a learned ecclesiastic, 
has fortunately survived. There is also another dis- 
tinct tongue which remains among a half-savage tribe 
called the Urus, who dwell, now very few in number, 
among the rushy lagoons on the Desaguadero River, 
near the southwest end of Lake Titicaca. With these 
exceptions, the Spaniards seem to have found on their 
arrival only two forms of speech prevailing over Peru, 
corresponding to two racial divisions, the Quichuas to 
which the Incas apparently belonged, and the Aymar&s. 
The latter held all the Collao, i.e. the country round 
Titicaca, and south of it round La Paz. The former 
occupied the northern valleys of Peru and the coast 
regions south of Lima, and a part of what is now south- 
ern Bolivia around Oruro and Uyuni. As these two 
languages are of the same type, it is generally held that 
the Quichua and Aymard, races are cognate. Those who 
know both declare that the Quichuas are the gentler 
and the less forcible. The Aymaras, by the testimony 
of European as well as Peruvian observers, are ruder in 
manners, more sullen and vindictive in disposition. 



184 SOUTH AMERICA 

Both races are alike secretive and suspicious of the 
whites, and for this sentiment they have had good reason. 
The impressions of a passing traveller are of no value, 
but it seemed to me, in noting the faces and deportment 
of the Indians whom we saw, that while both races had 
less intelligence and rather less look of personal dignity 
than the Indians of Mexico, the Aymaras seemed both a 
more dogged and a less cheerful race than the Quichuas. 
We might, perhaps, expect to find little buoyancy of spirit 
in those to whom Nature turns on this wind-swept roof of 
the world so stern a countenance. Yet the Icelander, 
whose far-distant isle is surrounded by a melancholy 
ocean, is of a lively and cheerful temper. 

Both Quichuas and Aymaras have that remarkable 
impassiveness and detachment which belongs to all the 
American peoples and which in the Old World one finds 
only in some of the East Asiatic races. With plenty of 
stability, they lack initiative. They make steady sol- 
diers, and fight well under white, or mestizo, leaders, 
but one seldom hears of a pure Indian accomplishing 
anything or rising either through war or politics, or in 
any profession, above the level of his class. The Mexican 
Juarez, the conqueror of Maximilian and of the priest- 
hood, was a pure-blooded Indian. Since the days of 
the Araucanian chiefs Lautaro and Caupolican, South 
America has shewn no native quite equal to him. Curi- 
osity and ambition are alike wanting to the race. 
Though one sees plenty of Indian blood in Peruvians 
and Bolivians of eminence, so that there must have been 
formerly much racial intermixture, and though there is 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 185 

practically no social distinction (except in three or four 
cities) between the white and the educated mestizo, in- 
termarriage between pure Indians and pure Europeans 
is very uncommon. 

The Indian of the plateau is still only a half -civilized 
man and less than half a Christian, He retains his 
primeval Nature worship, which groups together the 
spirits that dwell in mountains, rivers, and rocks with 
the spirits of ancestors, revering and propitiating all as 
Achachilas. In the same ceremony his medicine man 
invokes the Christian " Dios " to favour the building of 
a house, or whatever enterprise he undertakes, and 
simultaneously invokes the Achachilas, propitiating 
them also by offerings, the gift made to the Earth 
Spirit being buried in the soil. 1 Similarly he retains 
the ceremonial dances of heathendom and has secret 
dancing guilds, of whose mysteries the white man can 
learn nothing. His morality is what it was, in theory 
and practice, four centuries ago. He neither loves nor 
hates, but fears, the white man, and the white man 
neither loves nor hates, but despises him, there being 
some fear, at least in Bolivia, mingled with the con- 
tempt. They are held together neither by social rela- 
tions nor by political, but by the need which the white 
landowner has for the Indian's labour and by the power 
of long habit which has made the Indian acquiesce in 
his subjection as a rent payer. Neither of them ever 
refers to the Conquest. The white man does not honour 

1 Mr. Bandelier (Islands of Titicaca and Koati) gives an interest- 
ing description of such, a ceremony. 



186 SOUTH AMERICA 

the memory of Pizarro ; to the Indian the story is too 
dim and distant to affect his mind. Nor is it the least 
remarkable feature of the situation that the mestizo, or 
half-breed, forms no link between the races. He prefers 
to speak Spanish which the Indian rarely understands. 
He is held to belong to the upper race, which is, for 
social and political purposes, though not by right of 
numbers, the Peruvian (or Bolivian) nation. 

In no capital city have I felt so far removed from the 
great world, the European and Asiatic and North Ameri- 
can parts of which are now so closely linked together, as 
here in La Paz. There may probably be an equal sense 
of isolation in Quito and Bogota, there can hardly be 
a stronger one. To be enclosed between two lofty 
ranges and two deserts, to live at the bottom of a hole 
and yet be nearly as high above sea-level as the top of the 
Rocky Mountains or the Jungfrau are strange conditions 
for a dwelling place. Nevertheless it was a place in 
which one might do much meditation, for new sensa- 
tions awaken new thoughts, and solitude helps one to 
pursue them. So it was with regret for everything ex- 
cept its climate that we quitted La Paz early one morn- 
ing to resume our southward journey, bidding a long 
farewell to the Achachila 1 of the majestic Illimani, to 
which we had offered orisons of admiration in each dawn- 
ing and each departing light. After we had climbed to 
the rim of the Barranca in the electric car, an hour's 
run on the steam railroad carried us across the open 
plateau to Viacha, whence one route leads to Titicaca 

1 Mountain Spirit. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 187 

and over the lake to Mollendo, and another, now in con- 
struction, will in 1913 be ready to carry passengers down 
through the great Western Cordillera to the Pacific at 
Arica. 1 As this will be hereafter the most direct way of 
reaching La Paz from the coast, Viacha may some day 
be an important railroad centre, like Crewe or Chicago 
or Cologne. At present it is inexpressibly bleak and 
dreary, standing alone on a dusty and treeless waste. 
But the traveller of the future who has to wait here 
to "make his connections" will, while he paces up and 
down enquiring how much the incoming train is behind 
time, be able to feast his eyes on the incomparable view 
of the great Cordillera Real, piercing the northeastern 
sky, and here ending towards the south in the snowy 
pyramid of Huayna Potosi, round whose flanks gather 
the clouds that rise from the moist eastern forests 
sixteen thousand feet below. 

At Viacha we entered the cars of the Antof agasta and 
Bolivia railroad, owned by an enterprising English com- 
pany, and moved off to the south across a wide undulat- 
ing plain which seemed an arid waste, but turned out 
to be pastured upon by flocks of sheep and llamas. 
Dry as the ground looked, — it was the end of Septem- 
ber, when the summer showers were just beginning, — 
there was feed to be had and a few brooks here and 
there supplied drink. Some of those ancient round 
buildings of unmortared stone which the natives call 
Chulpas and which seem to have served as tombs rather 
than shrines were to be seen. Here and there were vil- 
lages, clusters of rude mud huts, sometimes with a bare, 
1 This line has now (December, 1912) been completed. 



188 SOUTH AMERICA 

ugly church far too large for the place, and probably 
owing its size to the zeal of some seventeenth-century 
Jesuit or Augustinian. At first low, brown mountains 
cut off to the west the view of that Western Cordillera 
through which the Arica line is making its difficult way, 
but presently they subside, and one sees far off across 
the plain a group of magnificent snowy peaks, appar- 
ently, from their shape and their isolation, ancient vol- 
canoes. Sahama, the highest, a pyramidal cone of 
beautiful proportions, seemed, from the amount of snow 
it carried, to be not less than 21,000 feet high. It has 
never yet been ascended. In this western range the 
snow line is higher than it is in the Eastern Cordillera 
because the latter receives more moisture. To the 
northeast the great Cordillera Real which one admires 
from Titicaca has now disappeared behind the low 
ridges crossing the plain, and Illimani is seen only 
now and then overtopping the nearer hills. On the 
east, however, farther south than Illimani, a new fine 
of snows comes into view, distant, perhaps, nearly a 
hundred miles and doubtless forming part of the Eastern 
Cordillera. On each side there stretches out a wide 
plain, but in one place the line runs for some miles 
through a range of hills of black (apparently volcanic) 
rock, following the course of a stream which presently 
wanders off to the west and is there lost, swallowed 
up in marshes. Besides the tufts of coarse bunch grass 
and a few low shrubs, there is still in the moister spots 
some little pasture, — it is astonishing how llamas can 
find something to eat on what seems bare ground, — 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 189 

but the land grows more and more sterile as the line 
continues southward. Presently the Indian villages 
cease; and great flats are seen to the west which are 
covered by water in the wet season. At last a group 
of high, brown hills marks the site of Oruro, an old and 
famous mining town, one of whose mines, which has 
been worked for hundreds of years, formerly stood 
second only to Potosi in its output of silver. Copper 
and tin as well as silver are worked in the hills, and on 
mining depends the prosperity of the town, which has 
now some twenty thousand inhabitants. The long, 
straight streets of mean one-story adobe houses, covered 
with plaster, with only a few better residences where the 
business men and foreign mining people live, give little 
idea of the former importance of the place, but there is 
a large and rather handsome Plaza wherein stand the 
government buildings and a well-built arcade contain- 
ing good shops. Beside the big church are two enor- 
mous bells, of which the city has long been proud, 
but which have to stand on the ground because too 
heavy for the little erection on the church roof on 
which the bells in daily use are hung. To the east, be- 
yond a barren flat some eight or ten miles wide, a range 
of hills bounds the plateau, and beyond them the ground 
falls towards the Argentine frontier, so that within a day 
or two's riding one can get off this dry land of scorching 
days and freezing nights down into soft moist air and 
tall trees. 

Oruro used to be the end of the railway which came 
up hither from the Pacific coast, and from here south- 



190 SOUTH AMERICA 

ward the gauge is of only two feet and a half. It is, 
however, to be widened, for traffic is increasing, and 
the company prosperous. 

Next to the Germans, the most ubiquitous people in 
the world are the Aberdonians, so I was scarcely sur- 
prised to meet one here in the person of the principal 
doctor of the place, who, when we had talked about our 
friends on the banks of the far-distant Dee, gave me 
much information regarding the health conditions of 
Bolivia. He described Oruro as a more agreeable place 
of residence than its rather dreary externals promised. 
There was some agreeable society, for mining, which 
does not improve the quality of the working population, 
usually draws to a place a number of men of superior 
ability and sometimes of scientific attainments. Here, 
as elsewhere in Bolivia, foreigners, including some Chil- 
eans, own the mines, while business is chiefly in the 
hands of Germans. Manual labour is done by Indians 
(here speaking Quichua), whose number does not in- 
crease, because, although the families are large, the 
mortality among their children is very high, or else by 
half-breeds, here usually called Cholos, who would be 
good workers, were they not addicted to the use of the 
horrible spirits that are too easily procurable. There 
are, however, also some Chilean half-breeds and some 
English-speaking men, brought for the higher kinds of 
work. 

About twenty miles away to the south is the great 
lagoon called Aullagas or Poopo, — the names are taken 
from villages on its shores, — which is fed by the river 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 191 

Desaguadero. This singular lake, which has the inter- 
est of a vanishing quantity, is fifty-three miles long by 
twenty-four broad, is nowhere more than nine feet deep 
and mostly less than five, is salt, turbid, with a bottom 
of dark mud, and full of fish too small to be worth catch- 
ing. Like those of Titicaca they belong to species found 
nowhere else. Having so small a volume in proportion 
to the surface area which it exposes to a strong sun 
and an intensely dry air, it loses by evaporation all the 
water it receives by the river from Titicaca and prob- 
ably a little more, for it seems to be now shrinking. 
When Titicaca, itself probably subsiding, has still less 
to give, Poopo will disappear altogether, and this plain 
will become a sheet of glittering salt. 1 

As one pursues the journey farther south, the country 
becomes always more arid, and at Uyuni, the next town 
of consequence, it is a veritable desert where only the 
smallest stunted shrubs are seen among the sand and 
stones. This uninhabited region will soon be a converg- 
ing point of railroads, for it is here that the existing 
line from La Paz to the Pacific coast at Antofagasta 
is to be joined by the new railway which is to be con- 
structed to provide a quick through route from central 
Bolivia to the Atlantic coast at Buenos Aires. Its com- 
pletion from Uyuni to Tupiza near the Argentine bor- 
der is expected by 1916, and when the link has been 
made, there will be a complete railway connection across 
the Continent from the River Plate to the Pacific at 

1 1 take these details from Dr. Romero's Los Lagos de los 
Altiplanos, translated from the French of Dr. Neveu Lemaire. 



192 SOUTH AMERICA 

Arica. Bolivia has hitherto suffered greatly from the 
want of communications, so when La Paz has been 
brought within twenty-four hours of the one ocean at 
Arica and within seventy-two or eighty hours of the 
other at Buenos Aires, a great impetus ought to be given 
to her export trade. This lofty and desert part of Bo- 
livia finds its only source of wealth in minerals. The 
Western Cordillera is especially rich in copper and sil- 
ver, the Eastern in gold and tin. One-third of all the 
world's production of tin now comes from Bolivia. Be- 
sides the silver found in various places, — the great silver 
mountain is still worked at Potosi, — the eastern spurs 
of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are believed to con- 
tain plenty of gold, which would be extracted from the 
gravels, perhaps from rock reefs also, much more exten- 
sively, but for the extreme difficulty of conveying mine 
machinery across the mountains down abrupt slopes 
and through trackless forests. It was from these East 
Andean regions that the Incas obtained those vast 
stores of gold which excited the cupidity of the Span- 
iards. Pizarro got from Atahuallpa a quantity roughly 
estimated at £3,000,000 ($15,000,000) on a promise that 
the Inca's life would be spared, — a promise broken as 
soon as most of the gold had been delivered. Yet the 
contemporary Spanish annalists declare that what the 
Spaniards laid their hands upon first and last in the days 
of the Conquest was much less than what the Indians 
buried or threw into the lakes when they could no longer 
guard it. Great, however, as is the mineral wealth of 
the Bolivian highlands, it is less on them, than on the 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 193 

development of the agricultural and pastoral resources 
of the eastern part of the republic that future prosperity 
must in the long run depend. Mines are a transitory 
source of wealth; they enrich the foreign capitalist 
rather than the nation itself ; they do not help to build 
up an intelligent and settled body of responsible citizens. 
It is not solely for the sake of industry and com- 
merce that Bolivia may welcome the advent of railways. 
She is the least naturally cohesive and in some ways 
the least nationally united of South American states. 
Europeans and North Americans hear but little about 
her, and underestimate the difficulties she has had to 
contend with. Imagine a country as big as the Ger- 
man and Austrian dominions put together, with a 
population less than that of Denmark, four-fifths of 
it consisting of semicivilized or uncivilized Indians, and 
the few educated men of European or mixed stock 
scattered here and there in half a dozen towns, none of 
which has more than a small number of capable citi- 
zens of that stock. An energetic monarch with a small 
but efficient and mobile army might rule such a country, 
but it offers obvious difficulties to the smooth working 
of a republican government, for one of the essentials to 
such a government is that the minority of competent 
citizens, be they many or few, should be in easy com- 
munication with one another, capable of understanding 
one another and of creating a public opinion. This has 
hitherto been difficult, owing to the want of railways, 
for Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Sucre (Chuquisaca) 
have all been a many days' journey from one another and 



194 SOUTH AMERICA 

from La Paz. These towns know little of one another 
and are mutually jealous. The old Spanish-colonial 
element in them regards with disfavour the larger but 
more Indian La Paz. Sucre is made the legal capital, 
but neither it nor any other city has both the size and 
the central position that would qualify to act as a uni- 
fying force. There is hardly any immigration, and little 
natural increase of population, so the vacant spaces do 
not fill up, even where they are habitable. Anything, 
therefore, that will help both to increase the material 
prosperity of Bolivia and to draw its people together 
will be a political benefit. 

Besides the railway which is to run from Uyuni to 
Buenos Aires, five other lines through the High Andes 
are likely to be constructed. One is to connect Cuzco 
with the existing railway from Lima to Oroya, a won- 
derful line, which reaches a height of 15,600 feet. A 
second will continue that line eastward to the Ucayali 
River. A third is also to cross the Eastern Cordillera 
from Tirapata (north of Lake Titicaca) to the river 
Madre de Dios. A fourth will run from La Paz down 
the canyon of its torrent to the river Beni. A fifth will 
connect Potosi with a port upon the Paraguay River via 
Sucre and Santa Cruz. The opening of these com- 
munications must accelerate the development of Peru 
and Bolivia. 

Uyuni is smaller than Oruro, and even less attractive. 
It has an enormous empty plaza and four wide streets 
of mud houses. Standing at 12,500 feet above sea- 
level, in a dry and cloudless air, where the radiation 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 195 

of beat is great the moment the sun goes down, we 
found the later hours of night so cold that the water 
froze inside our sleeping car, while the heat of the day, 
reflected from the desert floor, is no less intense. There 
is a famous mine at Pulucayo, in the eastern mountain 
range, — some ten miles distant from Uyuni and fifteen 
hundred feet above the town. We mounted to it by 
a little railway and were struck by the appearance of 
vegetation when we had risen some hundreds of feet 
above the torrid plain. Conspicuous was a cactus-like 
plant, with white, silky hairs, lifting its prickly fingers 
ten feet up, and ending in clusters of brilliant crimson 
blossoms. The staff of the French company who work 
the mine received us hospitably and explained the 
processes of extraction and the way in which electricity 
is applied to do the work. Silver, copper, zinc, lead, 
and iron are all found associated here ; and shafts one 
thousand feet deep are sunk from the long galleries, 
driven far into the mountain, one of which goes right 
through to Huanchaca on the other side. A town of 
six or seven thousand people has grown up, to accommo- 
date the labourers, all Indians or Cholos. 1 A church and 
school and tiny theatre have been built for them, and 
as their hardy frames can support the cold and the thin 
air, they seem cheerful and contented. The contrast 
between the refined appliances of modern science and 
the rudeness of semicivilized man never seemed sharper 
than when one saw this machinery and these labourers. 

1 The name Cholo properly means the offspring of a mestizo and 
an Indian, but it seems to be currently used to describe a peasant 
with a marked Indian strain. 



196 SOUTH AMERICA 

From this height of about fourteen thousand feet one 
could look for more than a hundred miles over the 
desert, — and such a desert ! Many of us can remember 
the awe and mystery which the word Wilderness in the 
Old Testament used to call up in a child's mind. When 
a boy reads of the Desert of Sahara, he pictures it as 
terrible and deathful. After he has grown up and 
travelled outside Europe, the only continent that has no 
wildernesses, and has seen the deserts on either side of 
Egypt, or the Kalahari in South Africa, or the deserts 
of India, or Arizona, or Iceland, he comes to realize 
that a large part of the earth's surface is desert, and 
that deserts, if awful, can have also a beauty and even 
a charm of their own. 1 This may not seem to the 
practical mind to be a sufficient final cause for their 
existence, but that is a side issue, and philosophy has, 
since Bacon's time, ceased to enquire into final causes. 
Of the deserts I have named, those of northern Arizona 
are perhaps the most beautiful, but this high plateau 
of southern Bolivia, while very different, is not less 
impressive. 

Right in the midst lay a sparkling plain of white. 
It was a huge salt marsh, on which the salt crystals 
shone like silver, for at this season it looks dry, though 
soft enough to engulf and entomb in its bottomless 
depths of mud any misguided wayfarer who may at- 
tempt to cross it. Beyond it to the northwest and 
north the waste of sand stretched out to the horizon, 

1 An admirable study of desert scenery may be found in a book by 
Mr. Van Dyke of Rutgers College (in New Jersey), entitled The 
Desert. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 197 

while southwest and south long ranges of serrated 
mountains ran hither and thither across the vast ex- 
panse, as if they had been moulded on a relief map, 
so sharp and so near did they seem to he, though fifty 
miles away. Some were capped or streaked with snow, 
indicating in this arid land a height of seventeen 
thousand feet. 

The splendour of such a view consists not only in the 
sensuous pleasure which the eye derives from the range 
of delicate tints and from the fine definition of mountain 
forms, hardly less various in their fines than they are in 
their colours, but even more in the impression which 
is made on the imagination. The immensity and com- 
plexity of this nature speak of the vast scale on which 
natural forces work and of the immense spaces of time 
which their work has occupied. 

Returning to the railway at Uyuni, we set off in the 
afternoon on our southward way across the desert floor, 
here perfectly flat and about 12,000 feet above the 
sea. A deep red soil promised fertility if water could be 
brought to it, but there was not a tree nor a house, though 
many a mirage shewed shining water pools and trees 
around them. Rocky hillocks rising here and there like 
islands strengthened the impression that this had been 
in some earlier age the bed of a great inland sea, larger 
than Lake Superior in North America, stretching from 
here all the way to the Vilcafiota peaks north of Titi- 
caca, and including, besides Titicaca itself, the salt lagoon 
of Poopo and the white salt marsh we had seen from 
the heights of Pulucayo. Subterranean forces which, as 



198 SOUTH AMERICA 

we know, have been recently at work all over these re- 
gions, may have altered the levels, and alterations of 
level may, in their turn, have induced climatic changes, 
which, by reducing rainfall, caused the inland sea to 
dry up, as the Great Salt Lake of Utah and the Aral 
Sea are drying up now. Looking eastward, we could 
see heavy clouds brooding over the eastern ranges, 
which shewed that beyond it lay valleys, watered by the 
rains which the trade-wind brings up from the far- 
distant Atlantic. Presently the sweetest hour of the day 
came as the grey sternness of the heights to the south 
softened into lilac, and a pale yellow sunset, such as 
only deserts see, flooded the plain with radiance. The 
night was intensely cold, and next morning, even at 
eight o'clock, the earth was frozen hard in the deep, 
dark hollow where the train had halted. 

We were now just inside the Chilean frontier, in 
the heart of the Western Cordillera, among some of 
the loftiest volcanic mountains of the Continent. On 
one side a branch line of railway, the highest in the 
world, begins its long climb to the Collahuasi copper 
mine. On the other side, there rose above us the huge 
black mass of Ollague, 1 snow patches on its southern 
side and steam rising in wreaths from a cleft not far 
below the summit. We guessed the height at 19,000 
feet. The Collahuasi mine is nearly 16,000. Beside us 
was what seemed a frozen lake, which glittered white 
when the welcome sun began to overtop the heights and 
warm our shivering bodies. Although the height is 
1 Pronounced Oyawe. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 199 

only 12,200 feet, this is a particularly cold spot, and 
the one place on the line which is liable to severe 
snowstorms. We had reached the smaller of the two 
famous lakes of borax, parts of which are water holding 
borax in solution, while the rest is mud covered with 
the valuable substance. They have neither influent 
nor outlet. This place, and a similar lake in Peru, not 
far from Arequipa, furnish the world with a large part 
of its supply, the rest coming from California and Siberia 
and Tibet, where the conditions of a rainlessness that 
keeps the deposit from being washed away out of the soil 
are somewhat similar. Presently we reached the larger 
lake, which is twelve miles long and two to five wide, 
and stopped to see the method of gathering and prepar- 
ing the mineral. One end of the (so-called) lake is dry, 
a thin stratum of whitish earth covering the bed of 
borax, which is about three feet thick. When dug out, 
the mineral is spread out on the ground round the 
works to dry, and then calcined in furnaces, forming 
a white mass of crystals, which are packed in sacks 
and sent down to the coast to be shipped to Europe 
and there turned into the borax of commerce. A 
large number of labourers are employed in this lonely 
and cheerless spot fifty miles from the nearest village. 
When I asked what fuel was used for the furnaces, 
they pointed to a long wire cable stretched through 
the air from the works to a point high on the mountain 
side opposite Ollague. Down this rope small cars were 
travelling, containing masses of a kind of very hard, 
stiff plant with whitish flowers so inconspicuous that 

/ 



200 SOUTH AMERICA 

it is usually taken for a sort of moss. 1 It grows abun- 
dantly on the slopes between eight and fourteen thou- 
sand feet, and its thick hard cushions have to be cut out 
with a pickaxe. Being very resinous, it burns with a 
fierce flame, but so quickly that large masses must be 
constantly thrown in to keep the fire going. Hardly 
anything else grows on the mountains, but they are 
inhabited by the little chinchilla, whose light grey fur, 
exquisitely soft, fetches a high price in Europe. 

From this point onward the scenery is of incompar- 
able grandeur. I doubt if there be any other spot in the 
Andes where the sternness and terror that surround the 
volcano are equally felt. The railway skirts the borax 
lake and then rises slowly along a ledge above it, 
whence one looks down on its still surface, where patches 
of whitish green open water reflect the crags and snows 
of the peaks that tower above. The deep, dark valley 
so winds and turns that it is in some places hard to 
guess where the exit lies. Above it stands a line of 
volcanoes, seventeen to nineteen thousand feet high. 
Their tops are of black rock, their faces, from which 
here and there black crags project, are slopes of ash 
and cinders, shewing those strange and gruesome con- 
trasts of colour which are often seen in the mineral 
world when vegetation and the atmosphere have not 
had time to tell upon them. In some of these peaks 
one whole side of the crater seems to have been blown 
out by an explosion, laying bare the farther wall of the 

1 It is called Yareta, and reminds one a little (though it is larger 
and harder) of the Cherleria sedoides of the Scottish Highlands. 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 201 

hollow, for the colours are just such as are seen in craters 
like those of Etna and Hekla, though here more vivid, 
because here there is so little rain to wash off their 
brightness. One such breached crater, forming the face 
of what is called (from the variety of its tints) the 
Garden Mountain, displays almost every colour of the 
spectrum, bright yellow and orange, pink and purple, 
and a brick red passing into dark brown. A ridge that 
stands out on its face shews on one declivity a yellowish 
white and on the other a brilliant crimson. But the 
intensity of these colours heightens rather than reduces 
the sombre gloom of the landscape. One seems ad- 
mitted to view an abandoned laboratory of Nature, 
in which furnaces, now extinct or smouldering low, 
fused the lavas and generated the steam that raised 
them to the crater's edge and sent them forth in fiery 
streams. Where there is now a deathlike silence, flames 
lit up the darkness of the clouds of ash that rose with 
the gushing steam, and masses of red-hot rock were 
hurled to heaven while explosions shook the earth 
beneath. 

In the middle of this narrow pathway which leads 
through the purple depths of the Cordillera we reach at 
Ascotan the top of the pass, 13,000 feet above sea-level, 
whence the valley, turning to the northwest, begins to de- 
scend towards the Pacific. The majestic portal through 
which one looks out into the western desert is guarded by 
two tall volcanoes standing side by side, St. Peter and St. 
Paul. The latter has been long extinct, but San Pedro 
still smokes or steams from its summit. A red hill near 



202 SOUTH AMERICA 

its foot has in quite recent times poured forth from its 
crater a vast lava stream through which the railway 
passes in a cutting, and which, splitting itself wherever 
it met a natural obstruction, has sent its long black 
tongues far down into the valley of the Loa River. 
For here, after hundreds of miles, one comes again upon 
a river. Behind the mass of San Pedro fountains fed 
by its snow break forth from the ground and come down 
into a clear green stream which has cut its way through 
the rock in a splendid canon, across which the line is 
carried. The river has been turned to account by build- 
ing several large reservoirs, whence pipes have been laid 
to the coast, supplying not only the nitrate fields below 
(of which I shall speak presently), but also the seaports 
of Antofagasta and Megillones one hundred and forty 
miles away, all these regions being without brook or 
spring. 

Here we emerged from the mountains into broad sun- 
shine and saw in front of us long ridges falling away, 
one behind the other, towards the still distant Pacific. 
Rattling rapidly down the incline, past junctions whence 
branch fines climb to mines high among the hills, we 
came at last to Calama, the first Chilean village, 
where rivulets drawn from the Loa make an oasis of 
bright green corn and alfalfa and support a few shrubs 
that gladden the wilderness. Evening is always the 
pleasantest time in the tropics, and it is most so in a 
desert, when, instead of the hard afternoon glare, gentle 
lights begin to fall upon rocks and earth and make 
their dryness luminous. It was our fortune to have at 



LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT 203 

this best hour of the day a distant view of the Andes, 
as lovely as the landscapes through which we had 
passed were awesome. We were now some way west of 
the chain, and could see it running in a long serrated 
line from San Pedro southward. This line is the West- 
ern Cordillera, which from here all the way to the 
Straits of Magellan is the main Andean axis, rising 
over, and apparently created by, the great telluric fissure 
along which the eruptive forces have acted. Nearest 
and grandest were the massive cones of San Pedro and 
San Pablo ; and from them the line of snows could in 
this clear and lucent air be traced without a break, 
peak rising beyond peak, till ninety miles away it sank 
beneath the horizon. 

Seen close at hand, as we saw OUague and the other 
volcanoes that rose above the borax lake, these moun- 
tains would be grim and terrible as those were, their 
slopes a chaos of tumbled rocks and brown cinders and 
long slides of crumbling ash, telling of the ruthless forces 
of Nature that had been at work. But seen afar off they 
were perfect in their beauty, with an exquisite variety of 
graceful forms, their precipices purple, and their snow 
crowns rosy in the level light of sunset. So Time seems 
to soften the horrors and sorrows of the Past as it recedes, 
and things which to those who lived among them were 
terrible and to those who had lived through them were 
fit only to be forgotten, become romantic to men of 
later generations, a theme for poets or painters, and 
glories for orators to recall. 

Just where the range is lost to sight in the far south 



204 SOUTH AMERICA 

it forms the western wall of the great Desert of 
Atacama, long a name of terror to the Spaniards. 
Not often in these countries does one find natural ob- 
jects associated with events important enough to figure 
in history. But it was in the dreary and waterless 
wastes of this desert that Almagro, first the friend and 
partner, then the rival and enemy, and at last the 
victim, of Pizarro, lost half his men and nearly perished 
himself in his march into Chile from Peru through 
what is now northern Argentina. The enterprise was 
one amazing even in that age of adventure, for Almagro's 
force was small, there was no possibility of succour, and 
he went into a land utterly unknown, a land of deserts 
arid mountains. But it was an unlucky enterprise. 
The tribes of Chile were fiercer than those of Peru; he 
had gone beyond the regions of civilization and of gold, 
and returned an empty-handed conqueror. 



CHAPTER VI 

CHILE 

Except Egypt, there is not in the world a country 
so strangely formed as Chile. Egypt is seven hundred 
miles long and nowhere save in the Delta more than 
twelve miles wide. Chile is nearly three thousand 
miles in length, nowhere more than one hundred 
and thirty miles wide and for most of her length 
much narrower. Even Norway, whose shape and 
sea-front best resemble those of Chile, has but fifteen 
hundred miles of coast and has, in her south part, 
two hundred and fifty miles of width. Much of 
the Chilean territory is a barren desert; much that 
is not desert is in fact uninhabited. Over large tracts 
the population is extremely thin. Yet Chile is the 
most united and the most ardently national in sen- 
timent among all the Spanish-American countries. 

Nor is Chile any more singular in the shape of her terri- 
tory than in her physical conditions also. On the east 
she is bounded all the way down to Magellan's Straits 
by the Cordillera of the Andes, the height of whose 
summits averages in the northern regions from fourteen 
to twenty thousand feet and in the southern from five 
to nine thousand, some few peaks exceeding these heights. 
Parallel to the Cordillera, and geologically much older, 
there runs along the coast a range averaging from two 

205 



206 SOUTH AMERICA 

to three thousand feet, between the foot of which and the 
ocean there is practically no level ground. The space 
between this coast range and the Cordillera is a long 
depression from twenty to thirty miles wide, some- 
times hilly, sometimes spreading out into plains, yet 
everywhere so narrow that both the Coast Range 
on the one side and the spurs of the Andes on the 
other are within sight of the inhabitants who live be- 
tween them. This long and narrow central depres- 
sion is Chile, just as the cultivable land on each side the 
Nile is Egypt; and in it all the people dwell, except 
those who are. to be found in the few maritime towns. 
It may seem strange that a country of this shape, 
three thousand miles long, and with only three million 
three hundred thousand people, should be conspicuously 
homogeneous, united, and patriotic. When the differ- 
ence between territorial Chile, the country of the map, 
and actual Chile dawns upon the traveller, his surprise 
disappears. There are in the republic three distinct re- 
gions. The northern, from latitude 18° south as far as 
Coquimbo in latitude 30° south, is arid desert ; some of it 
profitable nitrate desert, most of it, like Atacama, useless 
desert. The south, from Puerto Montt in latitude 42° 
south down to latitude 54° south, is an archipelago of 
wooded isles with a narrow strip of wooded mountain 
on the mainland behind, both of them drenched by per- 
petual rains and inhabited only by a few wandering 
Indians, with here and there a trading post of white 
men. It is the central part alone that is compactly 
peopled, a narrow tract about seven hundred miles 



CHILE 207 

long, most of it mountainous, but the valleys generally- 
fertile, and the climate excellent. This central part is 
the real Chile, the home of the nation. 

To central Chile I shall return presently. Meantime 
a few pages may be given to the northern section, which, 
though a desert, has an enormous economic value, 
and is, indeed, one of the chief sources of natural wealth 
in the two American continents. It is the region which 
supplies the agriculturists of the whole world with their 
nitrates, and the nitrates are here because the country 
is absolutely rainless. Rains would have washed the 
precious mineral out of the soil long ago and swept it 
down into the Pacific. 

One enters the nitrate fields in two or three hours after 
leaving the Bolivian plateau and passing through the 
Western Cordillera described in the last preceding chap- 
ter. They are unmitigated desert, a region of low stony 
hills, dry and barren, not a shrub, not a blade of grass. 
Sources of fertility to other countries, they remain 
themselves forever sterile. All the water is brought 
down in pipes from the upper course of the Loa, the 
stream which rises on the flanks of the volcano of San 
Pedro already mentioned. One can just descry in the 
far distance its snow-streaked summit. But the desert 
is all alive. Everywhere there are narrow-gauge lines 
of rails running hither and thither, with long rows 
of trucks passing down them, carrying lumps of rock. 
Groups of men are at work with pickaxes breaking the 
ground or loading the trucks. Puffs of smoke and dust 
are rising from places where the rock is being blasted 



208 SOUTH AMERICA 

with dynamite. Here and there buildings with machin- 
ery and tall iron pipes shew the oficinas where the 
rock is ground to powder, then washed and boiled, the 
liquid mass run off and drained and dried into a whitish 
powder, which is packed into sacks and sent down 
to the coast for shipment. The mineral occurs in a 
stratum which lies about a foot below the surface, and 
averages three feet in thickness. It is brownish grey 
in colour and very hard. There is a considerable by- 
product of iodine, which is separated and sent off for sale. 
The demand for it is said to be less than the supply. 

Each oficina — that is the name given to the places 
for the reduction and preparation of the mineral — is 
the centre of a larger or smaller nitrate estate, and 
the larger and more modern ones are equipped with 
houses for the managers and workpeople, each being 
a sort of village where the company supplies every- 
thing to the workpeople, who are mostly Chilean rotos, 
sturdy peasants of half-Indian blood. In South America 
one sees plenty of isolated mining villages in deserts, 
but here a whole wide region unable to support human 
life is alive with an industrious population. 

The air being dry and pure (except for the dust) at 
this considerable elevation, averaging from three to five 
thousand feet, the climate ought to be healthy. But 
it is impossible to imagine a more dismal place to in- 
habit, and those parts of the surface from which the 
mineral has been removed are at once forsaken. 

These nitrate fields cover a very large area in the 
northern provinces of Chile, but some districts in 



CHILE 209 

which the mineral is believed to exist are still imper- 
fectly explored, and many in which it does exist shew 
a comparatively poor stratum, so that it is not possible 
to estimate how much remains to be developed and the 
length of time it will take, at the present rate of produc- 
tion, to exhaust that amount. We were told, however, 
that, so far as can be conjectured, the fields might (at 
the present rate) last nearly two centuries, before the 
end of which period much may happen in the field of 
scientific agriculture. The export duty or royalty which 
the Chilean government levies produces a large annual 
revenue, and is, indeed, the mainstay of the finance of 
the republic, enabling taxation to be fixed at a low 
figure. 1 There are those who say that this is no un- 
mixed benefit, because it reduces the motives for econom- 
ical administration. The guano deposits of Peru proved 
to be the source of more evil than good, for by pour- 
ing into her treasury sums which excited the cupidity 
of military adventurers, they made revolutions more 
frequent. No such danger need be feared in Chile ; 
yet there are always temptations incident to the posses- 
sion of wealth which a man or a nation has not earned 
by effort. As the nitrates are part of the capital of the 
country which will some day come to an end, it would 
seem prudent to expend what they produce upon per- 
manent improvements which will add to the nation's 
permanent wealth, such, for instance, as railroads and 
harbours. A good deal is, in fact, being spent on rail- 

1 In the thirty years from 1880 to 1909 the Chilean treasury re- 
ceived £ 82,637,000 (about $412,000,000) in export duties on nitrates. 
p 



210 SOUTH AMERICA 

road construction, and a good deal on the creation of a 
naval stronghold and docks at Talcahuano. 

Between the nitrate fields and the sea there lies a strip 
of wholly unprofitable desert, traversed by that range 
of hills which rises from the coast all the way along the 
west side of Chile and Peru. Its scenery is bold and 
in places striking, but the utter bareness and brownness 
deprive it of all charm except that which the morning 
and evening sunlight gives, bringing out delicate tints 
on distant slopes. Here the railway line forks, sending 
one branch to the port of Antofagasta, and the other to 
the smaller town but better sheltered roadstead of Me- 
gillones. We went to the latter. Local interests of a self- 
ish kind have here, as elsewhere along the coast, caused 
the selection of Antofagasta as the principal terminus 
of the line ; and though it is now admitted that Megil- 
lones would have been a fitter spot, so much capital 
has been sunk in buildings at the former that it is 
deemed too late to make a change. The bay of Megil- 
lones, guarded by a lofty promontory on the south, 
and commanding a view of ridge after ridge of moun- 
tains stretching out to the north, has a beautiful sweep, 
and is enlivened by the abundance of seals and sea-lions, 
who wallow and bark to one another in the long, slow 
rollers of the Pacific. The beach is excellent for bath- 
ing, but the water so cold that only in the hotter 
part of the year do the Englishmen, who manage the 
railway and its machine works and who retain here the 
national love of salt water, find it suitable for any- 
thing more than a plunge in and out again. Though 



CHILE 211 

rain is extremely rare, one may conclude from the gullies 
in the hills down which torrents seem to have swept 
either that violent storms come occasionally or that the 
climate has altered since hills and valleys took their 
present form. 

Antofagasta, where we landed on the southward voy- 
age down the coast, is a much busier place than Megil- 
lones, but a less attractive one, for it has no such sweep 
of sand and space of level ground behind, being crushed 
in between the dreary, dusty hills and the rocky shore. 
Landing in the surf is often difficult and sometimes 
dangerous, but as the chief port of the southern nitrate 
country it receives a good deal of shipping, and has a 
pleasant little native society, besides an English and a 
German colony. 

Nearly five hundred miles further south are the 
towns of La Serena and Coquimbo, the former a quiet 
old Spanish city, placed back from the coast to be out 
of the way of the English and Dutch marauders, who 
were frequent and formidable visitors in these seas, 
after Sir Francis Drake had led the way in his famous 
voyage in 1578, when he sailed up and down the coast 
plundering towns and capturing ships. Coquimbo is 
a newer place, with a fairly good harbour, and thrives 
on the trade which the mines in its neighbourhood 
assure to it. It is an arid land, yet here there begins 
to be some rain, and here, therefore, we felt that we 
were bidding farewell to the desert, which we had first 
struck at Payta, fifteen hundred miles further north. 
Nevertheless there was little green upon the hills until 



212 SOUTH AMERICA 

we reached, next day, a far more important port, the 
commercial capital not only of Chile, but of all western 
South America, and now the terminus of the trans- 
continental railway to Buenos Aires. 

This is Valparaiso, where the wanderer who has been 
musing among prehistoric ruins and Bolivian volcanoes 
finds himself again in the busy modern world. The 
harbour is full of vessels from all quarters, — coasting 
steamers that ply to Callao and Panama, sailing ships as 
well as steamers from San Francisco and others from Aus- 
tralia, mostly with cargoes of coal, besides vessels that 
have come from Europe round Cape Horn or through 
the Straits of Magellan. The so-called harbour is really 
an open roadstead, for there is no shelter to the north, 
and when, as often happens, the dreaded gale from that 
quarter breaks, vessels that have not had time to run 
out under steam are in danger of drifting ashore, for 
the water deepens so quickly from the land that they 
cannot anchor far out. Why not build a breakwater ? 
Because the water is so deep that the cost of a break- 
water long enough to give effective protection would be 
enormous. There is a more sheltered haven some miles 
to the north, but as all the business offices and ware- 
houses are here, not to speak of the labouring popula- 
tion and their houses, the idea of moving the city and 
railway terminus has not been seriously considered. 

Seen from the sea, Valparaiso is picturesque, and has 
a marked character of its own, though the dryness of 
the hills and the clearness of the light make it faintly 
recall one of those Spanish or Italian towns which glitter 



CHILE 213 

on the steep shores of the Mediterranean. It resembles 
Messina in Sicily in being very long and very narrow, for 
here, as there, the heights, rising abruptly from the shore, 
leave little space for houses, and the lower part of the 
town has less than a quarter of a mile in breadth. On 
this narrow strip are all the places of business, banks, 
shipping offices, and shops, as well as the dwellings of 
most of the poorer class. On the hills above, rising 
steeply two hundred feet or more, stands the upper town, 
which consists chiefly of the residences of the richer 
people. Their villas, interspersed with gardens, have 
a pretty effect seen from below, and in rambling along 
the lanes that run up to heights behind one gets charm- 
ing views over the long line of coast to the north. 
Communication between the lower and upper towns is 
carried on chiefly by elevators (lifts) or trolley cars 
worked on the cog-wheel system. 

At the time of my visit, the city was half in ruins, re- 
building itself after a terrible earthquake. The lower 
town had suffered most, for here, as at Messina and at 
San Francisco, buildings erected on soft alluvial ground 
were overthrown more frequently and completely than 
those that stood on a rocky foundation. The op- 
portunity was being taken to widen and straighten the 
principal thoroughfares, and to open up some of the 
overcrowded poorer districts. The irregularities of the 
site between a sinuous coastline and spurs projecting 
from the hills make the city plan less uniform and rectan- 
gular than in most Spanish- American cities, and though 
nothing is old and there is little architectural variety, 



214 SOUTH AMERICA 

still the bright colours of the houses washed in blue or 
white, the glimpses of rocky heights seen at the eastern 
end of all the cross streets and of the sea glittering at 
the western give a quality of its own to the lower town, 
while the upper town has its steep gardens and tree 
clumps and wide prospects over the bay and the jut- 
ting capes beyond. 

But Valparaiso is perhaps most picturesque when 
seen from a steamer anchored in the bay, especially 
when its white houses and hills, green for a few weeks in 
spring, meet the eyes of one who comes from the bar- 
ren deserts of Boh via and the nitrate region. In front 
are the ocean steamers and the tall spars of Australian 
clippers ; nearer shore the smaller craft are tossing on 
the ocean swell; the upper town is seen rising on its 
cliffs behind the lower, with high pastures and rocky 
hummocks still further back. Far away in the north- 
east the snowy mass of Aconcagua, loftiest of all Ameri- 
can summits, floats like a white cloud on the horizon. 

A few miles north of Valparaiso is the pretty residential 
suburb of Vina del Mar, beyond which the rocks come 
down to the sea, here and there enclosing stretches of sandy 
beach on which the great green rollers break. The dark 
yellow Californian poppy (Eschscholtzia) which covers 
the fields in such masses round San Francisco is equally 
common here. Woody glens come down from the hills ; 
and in the bottom of one of these the principal sporting 
club has laid out a race-course and polo ground, where 
we saw the fashionable world gathered for these diver- 
sions, just as popular here as in Europe. (South America 



CHILE 215 

has not yet given any game of its own to the world as 
the North American Indians gave La Crosse and the 
East Indies polo.) Everything looked very pretty in 
the fresh green of October, but everybody shivered; for 
though the summers are extremely hot, the spring was 
less genial than one expected in this latitude. Valparaiso 
has winds equally chilling whether they come down 
from the snowy Andes on the east or up from the 
Antarctic current on the west. It is a windy place 
and in summer a very dusty one, but in comparison 
with the dismal barrenness of Mollendo and Anto- 
fagasta it deserves its name of Valley of Paradise. 
Despite earthquakes and northern gales, Valparaiso 
continues to be the most flourishing seat of world trade 
on the western side of its Continent, the only South 
American rival of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancou- 
ver. It is also the centre of the coast trade of the 
Chileans, the only Spanish-American people who have 
shewn taste or talent for seafaring. We felt ourselves 
back in the modern world when we saw a Stock Ex- 
change, having since we left New York passed near 
no city possessing that familiar appliance of civiliza- 
tion. Apart from stocks, abundant opportunities are 
supplied for speculation by the sudden and violent 
fluctuations in exchange upon Europe. The commer- 
cial houses are chiefly English and German, and among 
the Chilean firms there are some that bear English names. 
The Europeans of former days soon made themselves at 
home here, and their descendants in the third or even 
the second generation are patriotic Chileans. Some of 



216 SOUTH AMERICA 

the heads of British firms told me that the young men 
who come out to them to-day from England, are not, as 
a rule, equal either to those of thirty years ago or to the 
young Germans who are sent to serve German houses. 
"They care less for their work," — so my informants de- 
clared, — and "they do it less thoroughly ; their interests 
at school in England have lain chiefly in playing, or in 
reading about, cricket and football, not in any pursuit 
needing mental exertion, and here where cricket and 
football are not to be had, they become listless and 
will not, like the young Germans, spend their evenings 
in mastering the language and the business conditions 
of the country." What truth there is in this I had no 
means of testing, but Valparaiso is not the only foreign 
port in which one hears such things said. 

Fifty miles inland, as the crow flies, but much 
farther by railway, is Santiago, the capital of Chile, and 
in population the fourth city in South America. 1 Except 
Rio de Janeiro, no capital in the world has a more 
striking position. Standing in the great central valley 
of Chile, it looks out on one side over a fertile plain 
to the wooded slopes of the Coast Range, and on the 
other looks up to the gigantic chain of the Cordillera, 
rising nineteen thousand feet above it, furrowed by deep 
glens into which glaciers pour down, with snowy wastes 
behind. At Santiago, as at Innsbruck, one sees the 
vista of a long, straight street closed by towering 
mountains that crown it with white as the sea crowns 
with blue the streets of Venice. But here the moun- 

1 Buenos Aires, Rio, and Sao Paulo are the three larger cities. 



CHILE 217 

tains are more than twice as high as those of the Tyro- 
lean city and they never put off their snowy vesture. 
Wherever one walks or drives through the city in 
the beautiful public park and on the large open grounds 
of the race-course, these fields of ice are always be- 
fore the eye, whether wreathed with cloud or glittering 
against an ardent sky. 

The interior of the city does not offer very much to 
the traveller. There is one long, broad and handsome 
thoroughfare, the Alameda, adorned with statues and 
with four rows of trees, as well as several plazas, small 
compared to those of Lima and Arequipa, but very 
tastefully planted. There is a cathedral of the familiar 
type, spacious and well proportioned, with the usual 
two west towers and the usual silver altar. There 
are handsome government offices, and a fine building 
for the legislature. The streets are narrow, the houses 
seldom high, for here also earthquakes have to be con- 
sidered. Everything looks new, as might be expected 
in a place which was small and poor till the end of 
the eighteenth century, and which has grown rapidly 
within the last sixty years with the prosperity of the 
country. Prosperity and confidence are in the air. 
Great, indeed, is the contrast between old-fashioned 
Lima and still more ancient Cuzco, or between La Paz, 
nestling in its Barranca under the mountains like an 
owl in the desert, and this brisk, eager, active, modern 
city, where crowded electric cars pass along crowded 
streets and men hurry to their business or their politics 
even as they do in western Europe or North America. 



218 SOUTH AMERICA 

Santiago is a real capital, the heart of a real nation, the 
place in which all the political energy of the nation is 
focussed, commercial energy being shared with Val- 
paraiso. Here are no loitering negroes, nor impassive 
Indians, for the population is all Chilean, though close 
inspection discovers a difference between the purer and 
the less pure European stock. A great deal of native 
blood flows in the veins of the Chilean roto. 

There is little of historical or archaeological interest 
in Santiago, no skeleton of its founder (as of Pizarro 
in Lima), for Pedro de Valdivia was taken prisoner and 
killed by the Araucanian Indians hundreds of miles 
away; no palace of the Inquisition, for Santiago was 
in the seventeenth century too small a place to need the 
elaborate machinery of the Holy Office for the protec- 
tion of its orthodoxy. Till the War of Independence it 
was a remote provincial town. But Nature has given 
it one spot to which historical associations can attach. 
When Valdivia, one of the ablest and boldest of the 
lieutenants of Pizarro, was sent down hither to complete 
the conquest of that southernmost part of the Inca 
dominion from which Almagro had returned disap- 
pointed in the quest for gold, his soldierly eye lit upon 
and marked a steep rock that rose out of the plain on 
the banks of a torrent descending from the Andes. On 
this rock he planted (in 1541) a rude fort and, after re- 
ceiving the submission of the neighbouring Indians, 
marched on still further south, into regions which the 
Incas had never conquered. After some successes, a 
sudden rising of the natives chased him back and he 



CHILE 219 

had to take refuge in the fort upon this rock, now called 
Santa Lucia. Besieged for many weeks and reduced to 
the utmost extremity of famine, he held out here with 
that desperate tenacity of which the men of Spain have 
given so many examples from the days of Saguntum to 
those of Cortes at Mexico and from those of Cortes to 
those of Palafox at Saragossa. The Indians had, how- 
ever, no notion of how to conduct siege operations and 
at last Valdivia was relieved. The fort remained, and 
beneath it there grew up in course of time the city. 

The ancient Acropolis or Hill Fortress is a familiar 
sight in India, in Greece, and Italy, and in western 
Europe also. Gwalior and Trichinopoly, Acrocorinthus 
and Taormina, and in England, Old Sarum, Durham, 
Exeter, Shrewsbury, London itself, are instances, and 
the Fortress has often as in the last four cases, been the 
germ of a city. But so far as I know Santa Lucia, be- 
low which Santiago has grown up, is the only conspicu- 
ous instance in the two Americas of any such strong- 
hold built by Europeans. The hill, a little over two 
hundred feet high, is much lower than are the Castle 
Hills of Edinburgh and Stirling, and the space on it 
smaller. It is lower even than the Castle Rock of 
Dumbarton, which it more resembles. Like those three, 
it is a mass of hard igneous rock, so irregular in form as 
to suggest that it may be a detached fragment of an old 
lava flow, and most of its sides are so precipitous as to 
be easily defensible. The buildings which had defaced 
it having been nearly all removed, it is now laid out 
as a pleasure ground, and planted with trees. Walks 



220 SOUTH AMERICA 

have been made round it, with a footpath to the craggy 
summit, and there is a statue of Pedro de Valdivia, the 
only monument to any one of the Conquistadores which 
I can remember to have seen in Spanish America, for the 
men of that famous group are not much honoured by 
their colonial descendants. Every evening we walked 
to the top to enjoy the wonderful view over the valley, 
and the last rays of the sun reddening the Andean 
snows. A still more extended view is obtained from the 
summit, surmounted by a colossal statue of the Virgin, 
of the hill of San Cristobal, whose base is half a mile 
from the town. 

Chile, like the rest of South America, is a country 
of large estates, the early conquerors having received 
grants of land, many of which have not since been 
broken up into smaller properties ; so there exists a 
landed aristocracy something like that of England in 
the eighteenth century, with peasants cultivating the 
soil as tenants or labourers, while the small middle class 
consists of shopkeepers or skilled artisans in the towns. 
The leading landowners spend the summers in their 
country houses and the winter and spring in Santiago, 
which has thus a pleasant society, with plenty of talent 
and talk among the men, of gaiety and talk among the 
women, a society more enlightened and abreast of the 
modern world than are those of the more northern 
republics, and with a more stimulating atmosphere. 
Santiago has always been the centre and heart of Chile 
both politically and socially and has in this way con- 
tributed to give unity to the nation and to create a 



CHILE 221 

Chilean type of character. The jealousy felt by the 
country folk against the capital which has been the 
source of so much strife in other states was generally 
less marked here. Santiago leads ; Santiago's influence 
forbids any attempts at federalizing the republic. 
Though learning and science have not quite kept pace 
with conquest and prosperity, there is a thriving univer- 
sity, and a fine museum, placed beside the zoological 
and botanical gardens. The last and the present 
generation have produced some gifted writers and among 
the too few students of to-day is one of the most accom- 
plished historians and bibliographers in Spanish America, 
Senor Jose Toribio Medina. The bent of Chilean 
genius has, however, been on the whole towards war 
and pohtics. The material development of the country 
by railways, the opening of mines and the extension of 
agriculture, important as these are, do not absorb men's 
thoughts here so much as they do in Argentina and in- 
deed in most new countries. Politics hold the field just 
as politics held it all through the nineteenth century in 
England and in Hungary, perhaps the most intensely 
political countries of the Old World. 1 

The mention of these two countries suggests an- 
other point of resemblance. The Chileans, a race of 
riders, are extremely fond of horse-racing. The races 
at Santiago rouse immense interest and are the occasion 
of a great deal of betting, not only in the city, but also 
at Valparaiso, for such of the Valparaiso sportsmen as 
cannot come to the capital gather in their clubhouse 

1 It is sometimes said that one hundred families rule Chile. 



222 SOUTH AMERICA 

and carry on their betting during the progress of each 
race, every detail of which is reported from moment to 
moment by telephone, the bets coming as thick and 
fast as if the horses were in sight upon the course. 

Chile is the only country in South America which can 
boast to have had no revolution within the memory of 
any living man. In 1890 there was a civil war, but that 
conflict differed materially from the familiar military 
revolutions of the other republics. President Balma- 
ceda had quarrelled with the legislature, claiming that 
he could levy taxes without its consent, and was over- 
come, after a fierce struggle, the navy supporting the 
Congress, and the command of the sea proving decisive 
in a country with so long a coast line. So scrupu- 
lously regardful were the Chileans of their financial 
credit, that both Balmaceda and his congressional 
antagonists, each claiming to be the lawful government, 
tendered to the foreign bondholders payment of the 
interest on the same public debt while the struggle was 
going on. 

There were, at the time of my visit, five political par- 
ties or divisions of the Liberal party, besides the Con- 
servatives. The President had died suddenly while 
travelling in Europe, and the Liberal sections, holding 
the majority in Congress, met to select the candidate 
whom they should put forward as his successor. The 
discussions and the votings in their gatherings went on 
for several weeks, but force was never threatened ; and 
the Chileans told their visitors with justifiable pride 
that although twelve thousand soldiers were in or near 



CHILE 223 

the capital, no party feared that any other would 
endeavour to call in the help of the army. Chile is 
also the only South American state which takes so 
enlightened an interest in its electoral machinery as to 
have devised and applied a good while ago a system of 
proportional representation which seems to give satis- 
faction, and certainly deserves the study of scientific 
students in other countries. I saw an election proceed- 
ing under it in Santiago. The result was foreknown, 
because there had been an arrangement between Liberal 
sections which ensured the victory of the candidates 
they had agreed upon, so there was little excitement. 
Everything seemed to work smoothly. 

What I had seen of the aspects of nature round San- 
tiago increased the desire to know something of southern 
Chile, a region little visited by travellers, but reported 
to be full of those beauties which make the scenery of 
temperate regions more attractive, at least to persons 
born in the temperate zone, than all the grandeurs of the 
tropics. Accordingly we set off for the south, the Chilean 
government having kindly provided special facilities 
along their railways. 1 All the lines, except that which 
crosses the Andes into Argentina, are the property of the 
state. From Santiago to the strait which separates 
the large island of Chiloe from the mainland, a distance 
of 650 miles, there stretches that long depression men- 
tioned at the beginning of this chapter, the northern 
part of which contains nearly all of the population as 

1 A distinguished Chilean officer whose presence added greatlj 
to the pleasure of the trip was detailed to accompany us. 



224 SOUTH AMERICA 

well as most of the cultivable area of the republic. The 
railway that traverses it from end to end is the main 
highway of the country sending off branches which run 
westward to the towns that lie on or near the coast, and 
as it keeps generally in the middle of the valley, one 
gets admirable views toward the Andes on one side and 
the Coast Range on the other. 

Travelling south, one observes four changes in physical 
conditions. The rainfall steadily increases. At Santiago 
it is only about fifteen inches in the year; at Valdivia, 
440 miles to the south, it is seven times as great. With 
this abundant rainfall, the streams are fuller, the 
landscape greener, the grass richer, the trees taller. 
The mountains sink in height, and not the Andes only, 
but the average height of the Coast Range also. The 
snow line also sinks. Near Santiago it is about 14,000 
feet above sea-level ; at Valdivia it is rather under 6000. 
These four things completely alter the character of the 
scenery. It is less grand, for one sees no such mighty 
peaks and wide snowfields as rise over Santiago, but 
it is more approachable, with a softer air and more 
profuse vegetation. As compared with the desert 
regions of northern Chile, the difference is as great 
as that between the verdure of Ireland and the sterility 
of the Sahara. 

From Santiago to Osorno, the southern limit of our 
journey, there was beauty everywhere, beauty in the 
fields and meadows which the railway traverses, beauty 
in the wild quebradas (narrow glens) that descend from 
the Andes, beauty in the glimpses of the snow mountains 



CHILE 223 

where a break in the nearer hills reveals them. But 
I must be content to speak of a few points only. 

The long depression between the Andes and the Coast 
Range, which forms the best part of Chile, is crossed by 
a series of large and rapid rivers descending from the 
Andean snows and forcing their way through the clefts 
in the Coast Range to the sea. The first of these is the 
Maule, which was the southernmost limit of the con- 
quests of the Inca monarchs. Next to it, as one goes 
south, is the still larger Biobio, on whose banks the 
Spaniards strove for nearly a century with the fierce 
Araucanian tribes, till at last, despairing of success, they 
desisted and allowed it to be the boundary of their power. 
It is the greatest of all Chilean streams, with a broad and 
strong current, but is too shallow for navigation, and the 
commercial city of Concepcion, which lies a little above 
its mouth, uses the harbour of Talcahuano as its port. 

Here, one is already in a well-watered land, but be- 
fore I describe the scenery of this delightful region 
something may be said of the coast towns, which are 
quite unlike those of northern Chile and Peru. Con- 
cepcion, founded by Valdivia to bridle the Indians, is an 
attractive little city, with a large plaza and wide streets, 
which are tidy and well kept. Indeed, as compared with 
those of Spain and Italy, the larger cities of South 
America are as superior in cleanliness as they are in- 
ferior in architectural interest. Cuzco stands almost 
alone in its offensiveness to sight and smell. The cheer- 
ful airiness and brightness of the place are enhanced by 
the beauty of the wide river on whose north side it 

Q 



226 SOUTH AMERICA 

stands, and along whose shores, backed by wooded hills, 
there are many pretty villas with gardens, most of them 
the property of the British and German colonies who 
live here in social good will and active business compe- 
tition. The former have laid out an excellent golf course 
a few miles away towards the Ocean and have infected 
some Chileans with their passion for the Scottish game. 
Though not now so large as Valparaiso, the city has 
played a more important part in Chilean history, for it 
was the military capital of the southern frontier on the 
side of Araucania and the centre of the energetic and 
fighting population of that region. The leading families 
formed the only aristocratic group that was capable of 
resisting, as, after independence had been achieved, 
they did occasionally resist, the larger aristocratic group 
of Santiago. There was not enough wealth in those 
days to build stately churches or mansions, but the 
place has a look of dignity and is more Chilean and less 
cosmopolitan than Valparaiso. 

Talcahuano, possessing the finest natural harbour in 
central Chile, has been made the principal naval 
stronghold of this country which sets store upon the 
strength of its navy, deemed essential to protect its im- 
mensely long coast line. An enemy possessing a more 
powerful fleet would, it is thought, have Chile at its 
mercy until the longitudinal railway is completed which 
is to run the whole length of the country parallel to 
the coast. A naval harbour has been formed and 
docks built and batteries erected to command the ap- 
proaches. From the heights one sees across the ample 



CHILE 227 

bay the site of an old Spanish town, abandoned be- 
cause exposed to the English and Dutch sea-rovers of 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Since this 
time no hostile European vessels 1 have appeared in 
these waters, though they have seen plenty of sea-fights 
in the days of the Revolution and in those of the great 
war between Chile and Peru, and again in the civil 
war between Balmaceda and the Congress. 

Two other places on the Chilean coast are worth 
mentioning. From Concepcion a railroad, crossing 
the Biobio by a bridge three-quarters of a mile long, 
runs southward to the ports of Coronel and Lota. 
The shore, sometimes rocky, sometimes bordered by 
thickets or grassy flats behind sand beaches, is extremely 
picturesque ; and were it in the populous parts of Europe 
or North America, it would be lined by summer cottages 
and alive with children. But its vegetation and gen- 
eral aspect are curiously unlike those of the Atlantic 
coasts of either of those two continents, and remind 
one rather of California. At Lota, the hills rise boldly 
from the sea and a large island lying some way out 
gives variety to the ocean view. Here, on an eminence 
behind the town, is a garden of singular interest and 
beauty which I had especially wished to see because it 
had excited the admiration of my friend, the late Mr. 
John Ball, the distinguished botanist and traveller, who 
has described it in his Notes of a Naturalist in South 
America, published in 1887. It occupies the top of a 

1 Except when Spanish ships of war bombarded Valparaiso in 
1866. 



228 SOUTH AMERICA 

hill which breaks down almost precipitously to the 
shore, and was formed by a wealthy Chilean, the owner 
of a coal mine and copper smelting works close by, 
who built a handsome villa, and assisted by an en- 
ergetic Irish gardener, laid out a park with admirable 
taste, gathering and planting a great variety of trees 
and shrubs and so disposing the walks as to give de- 
lightful views along the coast and out into the ocean. 
There are few things in the course of journeys which 
one recalls with more pleasure than parks and gardens 
which combine opportunities for studying the flora of a 
new country with the enjoyment of natural beauty. 
This place had the peculiar interest of showing how, 
in a mild and humid climate, trees and shrubs from sub- 
tropical regions may flourish side by side with those of 
the temperate zone. Its profuse variety of trees, many 
of them seen by us for the first time, lives in my recol- 
lection with the gardens of the Scilly Isles and those on 
Valentia Island on the coast of Kerry, and the famous 
park at Cintra (near Lisbon), the two former of these 
possessing similarly favourable climatic conditions. 
The landscape at Lota is more beautiful than at any of 
those spots, and though it is marred by the smoke of 
the smelting works placed here to take advantage of the 
coal mine, one must remember that without the coal 
mine and the smelting works their owner would not have 
had the money to expend on the park and gardens. 

About two hundred miles to the south of Concepcion 
a large river finds its way to the sea through a compara- 
tively wide and open valley and meets the tide of the 



CHILE 229 

ocean at a point where Valdivia, the lieutenant of 
Pizarro, whom I have already mentioned as the first 
Spaniard to penetrate into these wild regions, built a 
small fort and called it by his own name. His fort 
was thenceforth the chief and sometimes the only seat 
of Spanish power in this whole stretch of country, 
constantly besieged and reduced to dire extremity by 
the warlike Indians, but almost always saved because 
it was accessible by sea from the ports of Peru. No 
trace now remains of the ancient stronghold, nor, indeed, 
are there any old houses, for in this well-wooded part of 
Chile houses are built of timber and fires are propor- 
tionately numerous and destructive. A terrible one 
had swept away half the town in 1909. They were 
busy rebuilding and improving it, for the country all 
round is being brought into cultivation, and trade is 
brisk. The phenomena remind one of western North 
America, though the pace at which population grows and 
natural resources are developed is far slower. There is a 
German colony, of course with a large brewery, the chief 
manufacturing industry of the spot, and a somewhat 
smaller British mercantile colony. The town stretches 
along both banks of the broad stream, on which fight 
steamers ply to the seaport of Corral, some twelve 
miles below. Here, also, the resources of the land are 
being exploited. A French company has erected large 
works for the smelting of copper, which is brought by 
sea from the ports of northern Chile. All the most 
recent metallurgical appliances have been introduced, 
and a considerable population has been drawn to the 



230 SOUTH AMERICA 

place. It is, however, an indigenous population. 
That inrush of immigrants from Europe, which is the 
conspicuous feature in North America, wherever rail- 
ways or other large works are being executed, or new 
industries set up, is here wanting. It has not yet been 
worth while to tempt Italian or Slavonic labour from 
Europe. Here at Corral, one touches an interesting 
bit of history. There are on both sides of the port 
ancient forts which command not only the harbour 
and the passage out to sea, but lovely views over the 
smiling land and wooded mountains. In their present 
form they seem to date from the late seventeenth 
or early eighteenth century. They stand now as 
mouldering and grass-grown monuments of a vanished 
empire. Erected to protect the colonists from British 
and Dutch attacks, they succumbed long afterwards 
to a later British adventurer leading those colonists 
themselves against the power of Spain. Less than a 
century ago (in 1817) they saw one of the most brilliant 
achievements of Lord Cochrane, then fighting for the 
Chilean revolutionaries, when with the crews of his 
few ships he stormed these forts, chasing the Spaniards 
away to Valdivia and received next day the surrender 
of that town, their last stronghold on the Chilean main- 
land. The services of this Scotchman are gratefully 
remembered here along with those of two men of Irish 
stock, O'Higgins and Lynch. All three have won a 
fame not unlike that of Lafayette and Rochambeau in 
the United States. 

In these seaports we saw the commercial side of 



CHILE 231 

Chilean town life, a side in which the foreigner plays a 
considerable part, whether he manages metal works for 
European capitalists or represents some great English 
or German trading firm. Temuco, situated in a purely 
agricultural district, supplying its wants and serving as 
a market for its produce, is of a different type and gave 
one a notion of what corresponds in Chile to the smaller 
country town of England or North America. It is a 
new place, for this region was almost purely Indian till 
thirty years ago, covers a great deal of ground, and re- 
minds one more of an Hungarian or Russian town than 
of the North American West, for the wide and gener- 
ally unpaved streets were not planted with trees and the 
one story houses were mostly thatched. The air was 
soft and humid, rich green meadows stretched out on 
every side and though there were evident signs of growth 
and comfort, nobody was in a hurry. The country is 
lovely. To the west are picturesque wooded hills, outliers 
of the Coast Range, and on the east, there opens a view 
of the Andes twenty or thirty miles distant, their snow- 
peaks rising behind a mass of dark green forest. We 
were entertained to dinner by the officers of the regiment 
quartered here, the commandant, who was also gov- 
ernor of the district, presiding, and met a large and 
agreeable company composed of the officers and their 
wives, a few officials, and some of the chief business 
men. Here, as everywhere in Chile, educated society 
is more modern and less ecclesiastical in sentiment than 
what the traveller finds in the more northerly republics. 
In listening to the graceful and well-phrased speech 



232 SOUTH AMERICA 

in which the commandant toasted the guests, we had 
fresh occasion to admire the resources of the Castilian 
tongue, which like the Italian, perhaps even more than 
the Italian, seems to lend itself more naturally than 
English or German to oratory of an ornamental kind. 

While in Peru and Bolivia the great mass of the ab- 
original population remained distinct from their Spanish 
masters, in Chile the fusion began early and went 
steadily on until, except in one district, the two races 
were blended. A certain number of families, includ- 
ing most of the aristocracy, have remained pure white ; 
but many more intermarried with the natives, and the 
peasants of to-day belong to this mixed race. As else- 
where in Spanish America, the man of mixed blood 
deems himself white, and does so the more easily here, 
because over most of the country there are no longer 
any pure Indians. The aborigines of this region were 
less advanced in the arts of life than those of Peru, but 
they were better fighters and of a bolder spirit. They 
have made a good blend with the whites ; the Chilean 
roto is a hardy and vigorous man. 1 

The one district in which a pure Indian race has 
remained is that in which Temuco stands, for this is 
the land of those Araucanian Indians to whom I have 
already referred, a race deservedly famous as the only 
aboriginal people of the Western hemisphere that suc- 

1 The word roto seems originally to have been a term of dispar- 
agement ; it meant ' a broken man.' Now it merely denotes one of 
the poorer class, and is opposed to pelucon, one of the upper class 
(literally a wig wearer) . 



CHILE 233 

cessfully resisted the European intruders. 1 I had imag- 
ined this people dwelling in the recesses of forest- 
covered mountains, and themselves tall and stalwart 
men like the Patagonian giants whom Magellan en- 
countered on the other side of the Andes. But the 
Mapoche 2 — that is the name by which the Araucanians 
call themselves — are, in fact, short men, though sturdy 
and muscular, with broad faces, not unlike some 
East Asiatic types. Their country is part of that long 
and wide depression which constitutes the Central Valley 
of Chile, a fertile land which, though doubtless once 
more thickly wooded than it now is, was probably, 
even in the days of Valdivia's invasion, partly open 
savannah. There is, and apparently there always has 
been, so little game that the natives must have lived 
chiefly by tillage, for they had, of course, neither sheep 
nor cattle. Although less civilized than were the tribes 
dwelling north of them, who had received some of the 
material culture of the Inca empire, they had risen 
above the savage state, and were at least as far ad- 
vanced as were the Algonquins or Dakotas of North 
America. They had organized a sort of fighting con- 
federacy of four tribes, resembling the "Long House" 
of the Iroquois Five Nations. Each tribe had its lead- 
ing family in which the chieftainship was hereditary, 
but if the eldest son were not equal to the place, a sec- 

1 The Yaquis of Sonora in Northwestern Mexico have never been 
subdued, but they are a small tribe dwelling in mountain fastnesses 
difficult of access. 

2 This is the form of the name that was given to me at Temueo. 
Others call them Moluehe or Maluche. 



234 SOUTH AMERICA 

ond or other son might be selected by the tribe in his 
stead. For war, they chose leaders of special bravery or 
talent, as Tacitus tells us that the Germans of his time 
did. Their weapons were the lance, probably a sort of 
assegai, and the axe or tomahawk of stone, and a club of 
wood, sometimes with a stone head fastened to it. When 
Valdivia, having overcome the more northerly tribes, 
and having strengthened his force by contingents from 
them, crossed the Biobio into the Araucanian country, 
the chiefs of the confederacy summoned a general 
assembly of all the fighting men — a sort of Homeric 
agora — and after three days' debate, resolved on re- 
sistance. In the first encounters they suffered terribly 
from the firearms and the horses of the Spaniards. 
Valdivia defeated them and marched through their 
country as far as the place where he built (as already 
mentioned) the town which still bears his name. After 
a few years, he returned with a stronger force hoping to 
complete his conquest. A hundred miles south of the 
Biobio the Araucanians attacked him. Their furious 
charge could not be stopped by musketry — gunshot 
range was very short in those days — the invading 
force was destroyed, and Valdivia, flying from the field, 
was captured. While he was attempting to save his 
life by a promise to withdraw altogether from Chile, an 
old chief smote him down with a club. 

From this time on the warfare lasted with occasional 
intermissions for more than sixty years. The Arau- 
canians discovered by degrees tactics fitted to re- 
duce the advantages which firearms gave to the Span- 



CHILE 235 

iards. They obtained horses, and, like the Comanches 
in Arizona and the Basutos of South Africa, learnt to 
use them in war. They produced leaders like Lautaro 
and Caupolican of talents equal to their bravery. 
When they found themselves unable to stem a Spanish 
invasion they retired into their woods, and as soon as 
the enemy had retired, they fell upon the forts and 
raided across the border. Weary of this incessant 
and apparently hopeless strife, the Spaniards at last 
agreed to a treaty by which the Biobio was fixed as the 
boundary. During his daring cruise in the Pacific in 
1578 Sir Francis Drake had occasion to land on the 
Chilean coast. The Araucanians, seeing white men 
come in a ship, assumed them to be Spaniards, and at- 
tacked them. Had they realized that Drake's crew, 
being the enemies of their own enemies, would gladly 
have been their friends, an alliance profitable to both 
parties could have been struck, and it might have been 
serviceable to Drake's English and Dutch successors. 
Fearing such a contingency, the Spaniards made it a 
part of their treaty with the Araucanians that they should 
give no help to the maritime foes of Spain. Fresh wars 
from time to time broke out, but they always ended in 
the same way, so Araucania continued independent 
down till, and long after, the revolt of Chile from Spain. 
By the middle of the nineteenth century the nation had 
begun to lose its old fighting habits. Diseases contracted 
from the whites had reduced its numbers and sapped 
its strength, while peaceful intercourse with the col- 
onists had mitigated the ancient animosity. Accord- 



236 SOUTH AMERICA 

ingly, when Chile, about 1881, asserted her authority, 
and the town of Temuco was founded in the middle of 
the Araucanian country, the idea of resistance which 
some of the chiefs entertained was dropped on the ad- 
vice of others who saw that it would be hopeless un- 
der conditions so different from those of the seventeenth 
century. Thus it may still be said of this gallant race 
that though they have consented to become Chileans, 
they remain the one unconquered native people of the 
continent. Though there has not been much intermar- 
riage between them and the Spanish colonists, the long 
conflict had a marked effect upon the character of 
the latter, giving to the Chileans a rude force and 
aptitude for war not unlike that which the constant 
strife with the Moors gave to the Spaniards in the 
Middle Ages. The earlier part of the conflict had the 
rare honour of being made the theme of an epic poem 
which ranks high among those of modern Europe, the 
Araucana 1 of Alonzo de Ercilla, who himself fought 
against Caupolican. No ill feeling seems to exist now 
between the Mapoche and the Chileans. Educated 
men among the latter feel a certain pride, as do the 
Araucanians themselves, in their romantic history, each 
race remembering that its ancestors fought well. 

How large the Mapoche nation was when the Span- 
iards first came is quite uncertain. The estimate of 
400,000 seems excessive for a people who had no cattle, 
and did not till the soil on a large scale. Even now 

1 First part written in Chile, where he was fighting, in 1558, and 
published in 1569. 



CHILE 237 

while some put the present population as high as 140,- 
000, others put it as low as 50,000. There is, unfortu- 
nately, no doubt that they are diminishing through 
diseases, especially tubercular diseases, which have 
spread among them from the whites, and are now trans- 
mitted from parents to offspring. Laws have been 
passed for their benefit, and a functionary entitled the 
Protector of the Indians appointed, but some of these 
laws, such as those restricting the sale of intoxicating 
liquors, are enforced quite as imperfectly as they are in 
other countries better known to us. The tribal system 
has almost vanished, but the local communities into 
which the people are now grouped respect the heads of 
the old families and often regret the days when a simple 
and speedy justice was administered by the chieftains. 

Scattered over a wide area they dwell in villages of 
grass huts or frame houses, the latter far less favourable 
to health, and live by tillage or stock keeping, though 
a few go north to seek work and are deemed excellent 
labourers. The custom observed by the Kafir chiefs 
in South Africa, of allotting a separate hut to each 
wife, does not seem to hold here, but as the huts are 
large, each wife, if there are several, is allowed her own 
hearth and fire. Some families have considerable es- 
tates ; some own large herds of cattle and sheep which 
at certain seasons are driven across the Andean passes 
to the pastures of Argentina. 

While the wars lasted there was, of course, no ques- 
tion of converting the Araucanians to Christianity ; and 
though in the intervals of peace friars sometimes went 



238 SOUTH AMERICA 

among them, they remained practically heathen till the 
establishment of Chilean authority in 1882. Their re- 
ligion is a form of that spirit worship which one finds 
among nearly all primitive peoples. Its rites are intended 
to avert the displeasure of the spirits, to obtain from 
them fine weather or rain (as the case may be), and to ex- 
pel a noxious demon from the body. The priesthood — 
if the name can be used — is not hereditary and is con- 
fined to females. The women who discharge the func- 
tions of wizards or medicine men are selected when 
young by the elder sorceresses and initiated with 
elaborate rites. A tree of a particularly sacred kind 
is chosen and a sort of ladder of steps cut in it, which 
the sorceress mounts to perform the ceremonies. 
When the tree dies, its trunk continues to be revered 
and is dressed up with fresh green boughs for ceremo- 
nial occasions. I could not find that any other natural 
objects, besides trees, receive veneration, nor is there 
anything to shew that the Inca worship of the sun and 
the host of heaven had ever spread so far to the south. 
The old beliefs and usages are now fast waning. Many 
Mapoche have become Christians, a considerable number 
Protestants, converted by the English South American 
mission, others Roman Catholics. They are described 
as a people of good intelligence, and easy to deal with 
when they are treated with justice, a valuable element in 
the population, and one which Chilean statesmen may 
well seek to preserve, if drink could be kept from them 
and the germs of hereditary disease rooted out. 

The occupation by the Araucanians of a considerable 
part of the central Chilean valley accounts for the fact 



CHILE 239 

that the population of the region beyond them to the 
south has grown but slowly. It now contains no Indian 
tribes till one gets across the channel of Ancud to Chiloe 
and the other islands along the coast. Few settlers 
came to these parts from Europe until about the mid- 
dle of last century the Chilean government encouraged 
an immigration from Germany which continued, on a 
moderate scale, for a good many years, but thereafter 
stopped altogether. Going southward from Valdivia 
one finds both in small towns and in rural districts 
round them a good many solid German farmers and 
artizans and tidy little German Fraus who might 
have come straight out of the Odenwald. We spent a 
night in Osorno, our furthest point toward the south, 
a neat and prosperous looking town, and dined with 
one of the leading German citizens, a man of wide read- 
ing, and especially devoted to Robert Burns, whose 
poems he recited to us, and to Thomas Moore, some of 
whose songs he had translated into German. There- 
after a group of the German residents hospitably took 
us to their club, where they have a concert hall and 
just such a Kegelbahn (skittle alley) as that in which I 
remember that we students used to play at Heidelberg 
in 1863, about the time when the parents of these worthy 
Germans were migrating to Chile. They gave us cham- 
pagne, the unfailing accompaniment of every social 
function in South America ; but it ought to have been 
Bavarian beer. This is the only part of western South 
America to which any considerable mass of settlers have 
come from Europe, for most of the English, Germans, 
French, and Spaniards one meets in the commercial and 



240 SOUTH AMERICA 

mining centres are passing business visitors. On the 
other side of the Andes it is different, for there the Italian 
immigration has been and still is very large. 

Comparatively few immigrants enter Chile now, 
which would imply that the quantity of land available 
for agriculture, but not yet taken up, is supposed to be 
not very large. To me the country we traversed ap- 
peared to be far from fully occupied, though on such a 
matter the impressions of a passing traveller are of little 
value. Of all the parts of the New World I have seen 
there is none which struck me as fitter to attract a 
young man who loves country life, is not in a hurry to 
be rich, and can make himself at home in a land where 
English is not the language of the people. The soil of 
southern Chile is extremely fertile, fit both for stock- 
raising and for tillage. The climate is healthy and 
mild, without extremes either of heat or cold. Wet it 
certainly is, but not wetter than parts of our own 
western coasts. 

The summer sun is strong yet not oppressive, the air 
both soft and invigorating, for Ocean sends up shrill 
blowing western breezes to refresh mankind. 1 There 
are no noxious beasts, no mosquitoes, no poisonous 
snakes, nor other venomous creatures, except a spider 
found in the cornfields whose bite, though disagreeable, 
is not dangerous. Intermittent fevers, the curse of 
most countries where new land is being brought under 

l 'A\\' del ZeQvpoTo \iyvjrvelovras dijraj 

— Odyss. IV. 



CHILE 241 

cultivation, seem to be unknown. There are deer in 
the woods, and plenty of fish in the clear, rapid rivers. 
The Englishman who loves hunting will not want for 
foxes ; the North American golfer will find grassy flats 
by the sea, waiting to be laid out as links. Remote, 
secluded, and tranquil as the country is, the settler 
should have little difficulty in procuring whatever 
Europe supplies, for even at Osorno he is only forty 
hours from Santiago, and Santiago is now only two 
days from Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires only seven- 
teen days from Europe. 

Perhaps it is the charm of the Chilean scenery that 
prompts a view of the country, considered as a home for 
the emigrant, more favourable than might be taken by 
one to whom fife would be just as enjoyable in the 
boundless levels of Manitoba as within view of a snowy 
range. Perhaps, also, this charm of southern Chile 
with its soft, green pastures and shaggy woods and 
flashing streams was enhanced to us by contrast with 
the dreary deserts of Peru and Bolivia, through which 
we had lately passed. Whoever has in his boyhood 
learnt to love the scenery of a temperate country never 
finds full satisfaction in that of the tropics, with all 
their glow of fight and all their exuberance of vegeta- 
tion. Such lands are splendid to visit, but not so good 
to live in, for exertion is less agreeable, the woods are 
impenetrable, and the mountains, therefore, less accessi- 
ble, and the constant heat is enervating, not to add that 
insects are everywhere, and in many places one has to 
stand always on guard against fevers. Nothing could 



242 SOUTH AMERICA 

be grander than the landscapes in the Andes which we 
had seen, nor more beautiful than the landscapes in 
Brazil which we were shortly to see. But of all the 
parts of South America that we visited, southern Chile 
stands out to me as the land where one would choose to 
make a home. 

Two excursions, one to the sea, the other into the 
hills, gave us samples of two different kinds of scenery. 
Of the many brimming rivers that sweep down from 
the Andes across the Central Valley none is more beau- 
tiful in its lower course than is the Rio Bueno. It has 
in the course of ages cloven for itself through the hard 
rocks of the Coast Range a channel so deep that the tide 
comes up to the little town of Trumajo forty miles from 
the sea, and from that town small steamers can pass 
all the way to the bar at its mouth. In one of these 
little craft which a kind friend had procured we spent 
a long day in sailing down and back again. The hills 
on each side, sometimes hanging steeply over the 
stream, sometimes receding where a narrow glen 
opened, were clothed with the richest wood. It was 
a brilliant day in October, answering to our April, 
and the sun brought out an infinite variety of shades 
of green in the young foliage in these glens, the trees 
all new to us, and the spaces between them filled with 
climbing plants hanging in festoons from the boughs. 
Wild ducks and other water-birds fluttered over the 
water and rose in flocks as the little vessel moved on- 
ward, and green paroquets called from the thickets. 
As it nears the sea, the river spreads into a wide deep 



CHILE 243 

pool under a crescent of bold cliffs, and at the end oi 
this is seen the bar, a stretch of sand on which the huge 
rollers of the Pacific break in foam. There is a light- 
house and a few houses near a flat stretch of meadow 
by the banks, the grass as green and the flowers as abun- 
dant as in Ireland. Specially vivid were the yellow 
masses of gorse, apparently the same species as our 
own, and, if possible, even more profuse in its blossoms 
than on those Cornish shores of which it is the chief orna- 
ment. I have seen few bits of coast more picturesque 
than this meeting of the still, dark river and the flashing 
spray of ocean under rocks clothed with feathery woods. 
On our way back something went wrong with the 
machinery and the vessel had more than once to moor 
herself to the bank till things were set right. This 
gave opportunities for going ashore and exploring the 
banks. In some places the forest was too dense to 
penetrate without a machete to hew a way through 
the shrubs and climbers. In other places where one 
could creep under the trees or pull one's self up the cliffs 
by the boughs, the effort was rewarded by finding an 
endless variety of new flowers and ferns. The latter 
are in this damp atmosphere especially luxuriant ; and 
their tall fronds, dipping into the river, were often seven 
or eight feet long. It was a primeval forest, wild as it 
had been from the beginning of things, for only in two 
or three places had dwellings been planted on level 
spots by the river and little clearings made; and the 
hills are so high and rocky that it may remain un- 
touched and lonely for many a year to come. 



244 SOUTH AMERICA 

The other excursion was towards the Andes. There 
is along the railway no prettier spot than Collilelfu, 
where a rapid river, broad and bright like the Scottish 
Tay, but with clearer and greener water, sweeps down 
out of the foothills into the meadows of the Central 
Valley. Here a French company have constructed 
a little branch railway, partly to bring down timber, 
partly in the hope of continuing their line far up the 
valley and across a pass into Argentina, in order to carry 
cattle to and fro. The manager, a courteous French- 
man from the Basque land of Beam, ran us up this line 
through a succession of lovely views along the river 
to a point where we got horses and rode for seven or 
eight miles further through the forest up and down 
low ridges to the shore of Lake Riiiihue. The forest was 
in parts too thick to penetrate without cutting one's way 
through creeping and climbing plants, but in others 
it was open enough to give mysterious vistas between 
the tall stems, and delicious effects where the sunlight 
fell upon a glade. The trees were largely evergreen, but 
few or none of them coniferous, for in Chile it is only at 
higher levels that the characteristic conifers, such as the 
well-known Araucaria, flourish. Here at last we found 
that characteristic South American arboreal flora we had 
been looking forward to, a forest where all that we saw 
was new, unlike the woods of western North America 
and of Europe, not only because the variety of the trees 
was far greater than it is there, but also because so 
many bore brilliant flowers upon their higher boughs, 
where the sunlight reached them. We were told that 



CHILE 245 

in midsummer the flowers would be still more profuse, 
but those we saw were abundant and beautiful enough, 
some white, some crimson or scarlet, some yellow, very 
few blue. One climber lit up the shade with its red 
blossoms, and below there were long rows, standing up 
along the path, wherever it was fairly open to the light, 
of white and pink foxgloves, a species closely resembling 
our own, while a woody ragwort, eight to ten feet high, 
bore a spreading umbel of yellow. The Calceolarias, 
frequent in Peru, do not seem to come so far south as 
this. Most of the trees had small leaves, but two, one 
called the lengue, valued for its bark, and another re- 
sembling a laurel, had large, dark green, glossy foliage. 
It was a silent wood, except for the paroquets and the 
occasional coo of a wood-pigeon; nor did we see any 
four-footed creatures, except two large, reddish brown 
foxes scurrying across the path ahead of us. Wildcats 
are scarce, and the puma, the beast of prey that has the 
widest range over the Western Hemisphere, is here 
hardly ever seen. The woodscape was less grand and 
solemn than what one sees in the great redwood forests 
of California or in the sombre depths of those that 
cover the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, 
where the Douglas fir and the huge " cedar " x tower so 
high over the trails that one can scarce catch the light 
through their topmost branches. Nor can I say that 
the views were more beautiful than may still be had in 
the few remaining ancient forests of England with their 
ancestral oaks and spreading beeches. But there was 

1 Thuja gigantea. 



246 SOUTH AMERICA 

here a peculiar feature, giving a sense of the exuberant 
vitality of nature, in the profusion of parasitic plants 
clothing' the trunks of the trees, both the fallen and the 
living, some of them flowering plants, but more of 
them ferns and mosses, especially tender little filmy 
ferns such as one finds on the moist and shady 
rocks of western Scotland and among the mountains 
of Killarney. 

We embarked on Lake Rinihue in a tiny steamboat, 
and sailed some miles over its exquisitely clear, green 
waters. Steep hills from two to three thousand feet 
high enclose it, and at its upper end, where it winds in 
towards the central range of the Andes, small glaciers 
descend from between high snowpeaks. The view, look- 
ing across the deep green of the forests, broken here 
and there by a rocky cliff, up to these glittering pin- 
nacles, had a beauty not only of color and form, but of 
mystery also, — that indefinable sense of mystery which 
belongs to little-known countries. In regions like Scot- 
land or the Alps or Norway one has historical associa- 
tions and the sense of a long human past to enhance 
the loveliness of hills and groves and streams. Here 
one has the compensating charm of an untouched and 
almost unexplored nature. The traveller in southern 
Chile feels as if he were a discoverer, so little visited is 
this land, and such a promise of wild beauty waiting 
to be revealed lies in the recesses of these mountains. 
Along the shores of Rinihue, which is twelve miles long, 
there is, save for a house or two at the place where we 
embarked, no trace of human fife. Other such lakes, 



CHILE 247 

many of them much larger, he scattered over a space 
some four hundred miles long and fifty miles wide on 
both the Argentine and the Chilean side of the Cordil- 
lera, a land of forests virtually unexplored and uninhab- 
ited, except by a few wandering Indians, standing now 
as it has stood ever since the Andes were raised. The 
day will come, perhaps less than a century hence, when 
the townsfolk of a then populous Argentina, weary of 
the flat monotony of their boundless Pampas, will find 
in this wilderness of lake and river and mountain such 
a place, wherein to find rest and recreation in the sum- 
mer heats, as the North Americans of the Eastern states 
do in the Appalachian hills ; and the North Americans 
of the West, in the glorious ranges along the Pacific 
coast. Superior to the former region in its possession 
of snow mountains, equal to the latter in climate and 
picturesque beauty, and to the naturalist more inter- 
esting than either from its still active volcanoes and its 
remarkable flora, this lake land of the southern Andes 
is an addition, the value of which the South Americans 
have hardly yet realized, to the scenic wealth of our 
plaoet. 



CHAPTER VII 

ACROSS THE ANDES 

For more than two thousand miles the republics 
of Argentina and Chile are divided from one another 
by the gigantic barrier of the Andes. So great is the 
continuous elevation of the range, so little commercial 
intercourse can there be across it, so few are the points 
at which it can be crossed even on foot by any travellers 
who are not expert mountaineers, that the communica- 
tions between those dwelling on opposite sides of the moun- 
tains have been at all times very scanty. The contrast 
between the two sides is marked. For eight hundred 
miles south of the Equator, the eastern slopes of the 
Andean chain have abundance of rain, while the central 
plateau is dry and the western declivity is a waterless 
desert. But in the region which lies south of the Tropic 
of Capricorn, outside the region of trade-winds, the 
exact reverse holds. In this southern section of the 
Andes it is the eastern side that is dry and the western 
side that is wet, because westerly winds prevail and 
bring up from the Pacific rain clouds that scatter their 
moisture on the heights they first meet and have none 
left to bestow on the Argentine side of the Cordillera. 
This great dividing range, checking intercourse between 
the peoples on its two flanks, is the dominant fact in 
the political and economic life as well as in the physical 

248 



ACROSS THE ANDES 249 

geography of the southern part of the continent. It 
has given these two neighbour peoples, Chileans and 
Argentines, different habits, different characters, and a 
different history. 

The infrequency of communication across the moun- 
tains was increased by the fact that most of the country 
on the eastern side, being sterile, was thinly settled, so 
that there were few people who had any occasion to cross 
the mountains, while the approach to the passes was 
difficult, for there was little food or shelter to be had 
along this track. In the middle of the sixteenth. cen- 
tury, however, Mendoza, Captain General of Chile, 
founded on the Argentine side the town which still bears 
his name. Placed at the foot of the mountains on the 
banks of a stream descending from the glaciers of Acon- 
cagua, it was a well-watered spot in a thirsty land, and 
population slowly gathered to it. As Argentina began 
to fill up with settlers in the latter half of the nineteenth 
century and as railways began to be pushed farther and 
farther inland from the Atlantic coast, the notion of 
making a railway across the Andes began to dawn on 
enterprising minds, especially after the Brenner and 
Cenis lines had been constructed across and through 
the main chain of the Alps. At last an English company 
built a railroad up to this town of Mendoza, and noth- 
ing remained except to pierce the belt of mountain 
country. That, however, was no simple matter. The 
belt is indeed of no great width. The Cordillera, 
which in the latitude of Antofagasta is the western 
edge of a high plateau, has here narrowed itself down 



250 SOUTH AMERICA 

to a single very lofty ridge, the summits of which are 
from 18,000 to 23,000 feet in height. There are trans- 
verse lower ridges running at right angles to the main 
chain, both westward towards the Pacific and eastward 
to the Argentine plain, but as these ridges average only 
thirty-five miles in length on the latter and twenty-five 
on the former side, the whole distance from the low 
country on the eastern side to the low country on the 
western, does not exceed seventy miles, which is less 
than the width (between Luzern and Arona) of the 
much less lofty chain of the Alps at the point where 
the Gothard railway crosses it. 

The central ridge of the Cordillera is, however, so con- 
tinuously lofty and its slopes so steep as to be passable 
for beasts of burden at very few points and then only 
during the summer months. Among these points that 
which has for a long time, probably from days before 
the Spanish conquest, been most in use, is the Uspallata 
Pass, so called from a place about fifteen miles west of 
Mendoza on the mule track which runs from that town 
towards the mountains. As population increased, there 
was at last substituted for the mule track a road passa- 
ble by vehicles. Finally, in 1887, a railroad began to 
be constructed up the long and winding river valley 
which leads from Mendoza to the main chain, while on 
the Chilean side, another railway was built up the 
shorter valley which rises to the western foot of the 
same ridge. 

Thereafter, the work of construction stopped for a 
good while, passengers continuing to cross the ridge on 



ACROSS THE ANDES 251 

foot or mule back, or in vehicles which painfully climbed 
the steep track that led over the top. At last a tunnel 
under this ridge was bored, and the whole line opened 
for traffic in 1909. The tunnel is only two and a half 
miles long, much shorter than those which penetrate the 
Alps at the Simplon, the Gothard and the Cenis. But 
its height above sea-level (12,000 feet) is much greater 
and the scenery along the line more striking. If any other 
trunk line of railroad in the world traverses a region so 
extraordinary, it has not yet been described. Till one 
is run from Kashmir to Kashgar, over or under the 
Karakoram Pass, this Andean line seems likely to "hold 
the record." 

The description of the Uspallata route may begin 
from Valparaiso. From that port to the junction for 
Santiago at the station of Llai Llai the country is hilly, 
rather dry, with rolling pastures and meadows along 
the streams, and thickets of small trees or scrub on the 
slopes, — a country much like southern California, save 
that there are no oaks and no coniferous trees. Further 
on, the hills grow higher ; there are rocks with patches 
of brilliant flowers, and occasional glimpses of the great 
range are caught up the openings of valleys. At a pretty 
place called Santa Rosa de los Andes, the Andean rail- 
way proper (Ferro Carril Transandino) begins, and we 
change into a car of narrower gauge. 

This Transandine railroad, one of the few which does 
not belong to the Chilean government, is narrow gauge, 
and its construction involved difficulties unusual even 
in the case of mountain lines, not only because the 



252 SOUTH AMERICA 

grades were very steep, but also because the valleys 
leading up to the central ridge were, especially that on 
the Chilean side, extremely narrow. To have bored 
corkscrew or zigzag tunnels, like those on the Gothard 
railway in Switzerland, would have involved an ex' 
penditure altogether disproportionate to the returns tc 
be expected from the traffic. It was therefore found 
necessary to adopt the cog-wheel system ; and on those 
parts of the line where the grade is too steep for the 
ordinary locomotive a rack or cog-wheel apparatus is 
fixed between the rails, and the locomotive, fitted with 
a corresponding apparatus, climbs by its help. This 
reduces the speed of the train in ascending those steep 
parts, most of which are on the Chilean side, and una- 
voidably reduces also the freight-carrying capacity of 
the fine. There is, therefore, not much heavy goods 
traffic passing over it. 1 But to passengers who wish 
to save time and escape a sea voyage the gain is enor- 
mous, for while the transit from Valparaiso to Buenos 
Aires through the Straits of Magellan takes eleven days, 
the land journey by this Transandine railway can be 
accomplished in forty hours. The regular working of 
the trains had been interrupted in the winter before our 
visit by heavy falls of snow, but the construction of 
snowsheds, which was in progress, has probably by this 
time overcome such difficulties. 
Travellers sleep at Santa Rosa in order to start early 

1 Many cattle are exported from Argentine to Chile, but these 
can here, as in the passes of southern Chile, be driven over the top 
of the ridge, though many now go by rail. 



ACROSS THE ANDES 253 

in the morning by the tri-weekly train which in twelve 
hours crosses the mountains to Mendoza. From the 
hotel at the station, we looked straight up a long, nar- 
row valley to tremendous peaks of black rock thirty 
miles away to the east. How they stood out against 
the bright morning sky behind them, a few white clouds 
hovering above ! One felt at a glance that this is one 
of the great ranges of the world, just as one feels the 
great musician in the first few chords of a symphony. 

Up this valley runs the railway past little farm-houses, 
surrounded by stiff poplars, which thrive well here, 
though the tree is not a native, but brought from 
Europe. Fields, irrigated from the rushing stream be- 
neath, are green with young corn; weeping willows 
droop over the watercourses, vines trail along the fronts 
of the cottages, and the pastures are bright with spring 
flowers. A cart road runs parallel to the line, and here 
one sees better than in the cities the true Chilean roto 
(peasant of mixed Spanish and Indian blood), in his 
rough coat and cotton shirt, baggy trousers and high 
boots fitted with large spurs, his low-crowned, narrow- 
brimmed felt or straw hat, and on his shoulders the 
thick homespun poncho characteristic of South Amer- 
ica. His horse is usually near him, for they are all 
riders, a sturdy little animal with many saddle-cloths 
and a heavy, high-peaked saddle and heavy bit. 

After eight or ten miles the valley narrows, and at its 
bottom there is only the torrent with sometimes a few 
yards of grass on one or other bank. The rock walls 
begin to rise more steeply, and the trees give place to 



254 SOUTH AMERICA 

shrubs. At a spot called the Soldier's Leap, the train 
runs on a shelf in the rock through a gorge over which 
the converging crags almost touch one another and shut 
out the light, the torrent roaring sixty feet below. 
One considerable stream, the Rio Blanco, descends 
from the south, but otherwise there are no side glens. 
Vast black precipices rise on the northern bank six 
or seven thousand feet above the river. Slender 
streamlets, perhaps the children of unseen snows 
behind, fall slowly from ledge to ledge, some of them 
lost in mid-air when a gust of the west wind sweeps 
them along. 

At last, vegetation having now disappeared, a great 
black ridge rises in front across the end of the valley 
and seems to bar further progress. On its steep face, 
however, one can presently discover a sort of track, 
winding up it in zigzags. This is the old mule path 
by which travellers used to climb slowly to the pass, 
itself still far behind. The spot at its foot, where there 
are a few houses, is Juncal, the last place where the 
wayfarer halted to rest before he started for the for- 
midable passage of the mountains. Here two glens open- 
ing from opposite sides meet at the foot of the great 
ridge. The glen to the north is short, descending 
abruptly from a semicircle of savage black peaks, the 
hollows between them filled with snow and ice. That 
to the south is long, narrow, and nearly level ; it is a 
deep cleft which runs into the heart of the mountains 
as far as the west side of the mighty Tupungato, whose 
glaciers feed its torrent. Up this southern valley the 



ACROSS THE ANDES 255 

railway, turning at right angles from its previous east- 
erly direction, runs for some miles, then crosses and 
leaves the torrent, turns north and mounts along a nar- 
row shelf cut out in the side of the great black ridge of 
Juncal, already mentioned. The slope rising above the 
line and f ailing below it to the valley is of terrific steep- 
ness. The grade is also steep and the locomotive toils 
and pants slowly upward by the aid of the cog-wheel, 
passing through tunnel after tunnel till at last it comes 
out, two thousand feet above Juncal, into a wide hollow 
surrounded by sharp peaks, those to the north streaked 
with beds of snow, those on the south of bare rock, 
because the snow has been melted off their sunward 
turned slopes. The bottom of this hollow is covered 
with enormous blocks that have fallen from the cliffs, 
and its northern end is filled by a small lake, part of 
whose surface was covered with ice. The fanciful name 
of Lago del Inca has been given to it. A scene more 
savage in its black desolation it would be hard to 
imagine. Compared to this frozen lake, the glacier 
lakes of the Swiss Alps, like the Marjelen See on the 
Aletsch glacier, are gentle and smiling. The strong 
sunlight and brilliant blue of the sky seemed to make 
the rocks blacker and bring out their absolute bareness 
with not so much as a moss or a lichen to relieve 
it. From the lake the railway, making another great 
sweep, climbs another slope and enters another still 
higher hollow, where it stops at the base of a steep 
ridge. Here a cluster of huts of corrugated iron, more 
than usually hideous in such a landscape, marks the 



256 SOUTH AMERICA 

mouth of the great tunnel, at a point 10,486 feet 
above the sea. In winter everything is covered deep 
with snow and now, in October, patches were still 
lying about and the cold, except in the sun, was severe. 
Big icicles were hanging from the eaves of the iron hut 
roofs. 

Reserving for a later page some account of the top of 
the Pass and the colossal statue of Christ which has 
been set up there, I will describe the route, as travellers 
now take it, through the tunnel into Argentina and 
down the valley to the plains at Mendoza. The tunnel, 
cut through hard andesite rock, under a ridge fifteen 
hundred feet higher, is nearly three miles long, and the 
passage through it takes ten minutes. The air is cool 
and free from that sense of oppression which people 
complain of in the Gothard. The Duke of Wellington 
used to say that the business of a general in war con- 
sists largely in guessing what is on the other side of 
the hill. Whoever crosses a hill on foot or horseback 
sees the surrounding landscape change by degrees, and 
is more or less prepared for the view which the hilltop 
gives of what lies beyond. But when carried along 
in the darkness through the very core of a great moun- 
tain range expectation is more excited, and the sudden 
burst of a new landscape is more startling. So when, 
after the few minutes of darkness, we rushed out into 
the light of the Argentine side, there was a striking 
contrast. This eastern valley was wider and the peaks 
rose with a bolder, smoother sweep, their flanks covered 
with long slides of dark sand and gravel, their tops a line 



ACROSS THE ANDES j 257 

of bare precipices, not less lofty than those on the Chilean 
side but shewing less snow. The air was drier and the 
aspect of things not, indeed, less green, for there had been 
neither shrub nor plant visible since we passed Juncal, but 
more scorched and more aggressively sterile. There was 
far more colour, for on each side of the long valley that 
stretched before us to the eastward the declivities of 
the ridges that one behind another dipped towards it 
on both sides glowed with many tints of yellow, brown, 
and grey. A great flat-topped summit of a rich red, 
passing into purple, closed the valley in the distance. 
The mountains immediately above this upper hollow 
of the glen — it is called Las Cuevas — though nine- 
teen or twenty thousand feet high, are imposing, not 
so much by their height, for the bottom of the hollow 
is itself ten thousand feet above sea-level, but rather 
by the grand lines with which they rise, the middle 
and lower slopes covered by sloping beds of grey 
ash and black sand, thousands of feet long, while at 
the head of the glen to the northwest glaciers hang 
from the crags that stand along the central range, the 
boundary of the two countries. In the presence of 
such majesty, the grim desolation of the scene is half 
forgotten. 

From Las Cuevas the train runs rapidly down east- 
ward, following the torrent through a confused mass of 
gigantic blocks that have fallen from the cliffs above, and 
after seven or eight miles, it passes the opening of a lateral 
glen down which there comes a far fuller torrent, bearing 
the water that has melted from the glaciers of Aconca- 



258 SOUTH AMERICA 

gua. The huge mass of that mountain, loftiest of all 
the summits of the Western Hemisphere, is seen fifteen 
miles away, standing athwart the head of this lateral 
valley. It is a long ridge of snow, arching into two 
domes with a tremendous precipice of black rock facing 
south, on the upper edge of which is a cliff of neve\ 
The falling fragments of thin ice feed a glacier below, 
just as a similar ice cliff above a similar precipice makes 
a little glacier thousands of feet below on the side of 
Mount Ararat. The top of Aconcagua is nearly twenty- 
three thousand feet high, and the valley at this point 
about eight thousand. Only in the Himalayas and the 
Andes can one see a peak close at hand soar into air 
fifteen thousand feet above the eye, and I doubt if there 
be any other peak even in the Andes which rises so 
near and so grandly above the spectator. It was first 
ascended in 1897 by an Englishman, Mr. Vines. The 
steepness of the snow slopes offered less difficulty than 
did the rarity of the air, the violence of the winds, the 
severity of the cold, besides the other hardships which 
are incident to camp life in this desolate region, where 
the climber, far from all supplies, waits day after 
day for weather steady enough to permit an attempt 
highly dangerous except under favouring climatic con- 
ditions. 

A little below this point one reaches the spot called 
Puente del Inca (the Inca's bridge). Unusual natural 

1 An account of the ascent and of all this region will be found in 
Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald's High Andes, the author of which was prevented 
by illness from reaching the summit. 



ACROSS THE ANDES 259 

phenomena are called after the Incas in these countries, 
just as they are after the Devil in Europe. Hot 
springs of some medicinal value which gush from the 
ground have been turned to account in a small bathing 
establishment to which a few visitors resort in summer. 
There is a real natural curiosity in the sort of bridge 
which the torrent has formed by cutting a way for itself 
underneath a detrital mass, the upper part of which 
has been bound hard together by the mineral deposits 
from the hot springs, so that it makes a firm roadway 
above the river roaring below. The place is, however, 
unspeakably lonely and dreary, bare and shelterless, too 
sterile for aught but a few low, prickly shrubs to grow. 
Over it whistles that fierce west wind which comes up 
from the Pacific in the afternoon, and sweeps down 
this valley chilled by the snowy heights which it has 
crossed. 

The journey down the valley from this point is a piece 
of scenery to which it would be hard to find a parallel 
on any other railroad. It is like traversing the interior 
of an extinct volcano, for the rocks are all volcanic, of 
different ages and different colours, black and grey 
lavas, yellow and pink and whitish and bluish beds of 
tufa and indurated ash, sometimes with long streaks 
of gravel or dark sand streaming down from the base 
of the precipices above. At one place there is seen just 
under such a precipice, a row of sharp black pinnacles, 
not unlike miniature aiguilles, apparently the remains 
of a lava bed that has disintegrated, leaving its harder 
parts to stand erect. These are called the Penitentes, 



260 SOUTH AMERICA 

from a fancied resemblance to sinners in black robes 
standing or kneeling to do penance. 1 I could perceive 
no trace of any denned craters or, indeed, of any recent 
volcanic phenomena in the valley, and should conjecture 
that subterranean fires had died out here many ages 
ago. Of the former presence of glaciers and the action 
of water on a great scale there are abundant signs in 
the remains of large moraines and in the masses of allu- 
vium, through which the streams have cut deep trenches 
all the way down the valley. Its mountain walls rise 
so high and steep that the snow mountains behind are 
hidden. But at one point where a narrow glen comes 
down from the south, there is seen at the end of a long 
vista, thirty miles away, the great, blunt pyramid of 
Tupungato. 2 Tupungato attains 22,000 feet, the upper 
six thousand of which are draped in white, and is, among 
the southern Andes, inferior only to Aconcagua and to 
Mercedario. 

About thirty miles below the tunnel the valley opens 
into the little plain of Uspallata, bounded on the op- 
posite or eastern side by a range of flat-topped hills, 
across which the old mule track and carriage road 
ran to Mendoza. This range, running parallel to the 
main chain of the Cordillera and therefore at right 

1 This name is in the Andes usually applied to the sharp little 
peaks of ice that stand up, like the pyramidal points of seracs, 
on the surface of Andean glaciers, and it suits them better, because 
penitents wear white garments. The similarity of form has how- 
ever caused it to be applied to these black towers also. 

2 It was first ascended by Mr. Vines in 1897. The measurements 
of Aconcagua vary from 23,200 to 22,425 feet. Mercedario is giveD 
at 22,300 and Tupungato at 22,015. 



ACROSS THE ANDES 261 

angles to the valley down which we had come, turns 
the course of the torrent southward, forcing it to find its 
way out to the level country through a deep gorge or 
canon. The railway follows the river. As we reached 
Uspallata, the declining sun was turning to a rosy pink 
the mists that hung upon the peaks to the northwest, 
now hiding and now revealing the snow fields that 
filled their highest hollows. The dry eastern hills 
glowed purple under its rays, and the purple was deep- 
ening into violet in the fading light when the train 
plunged into the depths of the canon along the banks 
of the swirling stream. Here we were at once in dif- 
ferent scenery. The rocks were of red and grey granite, 
and there were shrubs enough to give some greenness 
to the slopes. Stern and wild as the landscape was, 
it seemed cheerful and homelike compared with the 
black grimness of the volcanic region above. Night 
descended before we had emerged into the Argentine 
plain, and when we drove through the friendly fights of 
Mendoza to our hotel in the handsome Plaza, it was 
hard to believe that four hours before we had been in 
the awesome Valley of Desolation between Aconcagua 
and Tupungato. 

To these two mountains Mendoza owes its existence. 
It stands in an oasis watered by the torrent which 
brings down the melting of their snows, the rest of this 
part of Argentina being an almost rainless tract, where 
coarse grass and sometimes low scrub-woods cover 
ground that is barely fit for pasturage and hopeless for 
tillage. At this spot, however, the perennial flow of the 



262 SOUTH AMERICA 

glacier-born river suffices to fill numerous channels by 
which water is carried through fields and vineyards 
over a wide area, giving verdure and fertility. It was 
the good fortune of this position that made Mendoza's 
lieutenant, Castillo, choose this spot so far back as 
1560 for the first Spanish settlement made on this side 
of the mountains. For a long time it remained a tiny 
and isolated outpost, useful only as a resting place on 
the track from Chile to the Atlantic coast. But it was 
never forsaken, and though frequently shaken and as late 
as 1860 laid in ruins by earthquakes, it has of late years 
recovered itself and become a prosperous centre of 
commerce. 

It stands on the great Pampa, just at the point 
where the last declivities of that low, flat-topped range 
to which I have referred sink into the vast and almost 
unbroken level, slightly declining eastward, which 
extends six hundred miles from here to Buenos Aires. 
As the fear of earthquakes keeps the houses low, and 
the streets are wide, it covers a space of ground large in 
proportion to its population which is 45,000. The prin- 
cipal business thoroughfare is quite handsome with 
double rows of lofty Carolina poplars and a cool 
stream of reddish glacier water coursing along beneath. 
In the ample Plaza, planted with plane trees, there 
is a colossal statue of San Martin the Liberator of 
Argentina and Chile ; and quite recently a large park 
with an artificial lake has been laid out on the slope 
of the hill. All these adornments are due to the Men- 
doza River (the one which descends from Aconcagua) 



ACROSS THE ANDES 263 

and two other smaller streams, whose combined waters 
have been skilfully used not only to beautify the city, 
but to irrigate a wide space round. Most of the land is 
planted with vines, but all sorts of fruit trees, particu- 
larly peaches, pears, and cherries, are grown and de- 
spatched^by rail to the eastern cities. Vine culture is in 
the hands of the Italians, who have settled here in large 
numbers, and brought with them their skill in wine mak- 
ing. In an establishment which we saw, managed by 
an Italian gentleman from Lombardy, it was interest- 
ing to note how chemical science and mechanical inven- 
tion have changed the forms of this oldest of human 
industries. Thirty-five years before in the port wine 
country of the Douro I had seen the ancient wine-press 
scarcely changed, if changed at all, from the days of 
Virgil, perhaps from the days of Isaiah, perhaps from the 
days of Noah, with the old simple methods of casking and 
keeping the wine still in use. Now it is all factory work, 
done like that of a foundry or a cotton mill by all sorts 
of modern scientific methods and appliances. The wine 
made here is of common quality, intended for the humbler 
part of the Argentine population, who have happily not 
exchanged their South European habits for the modern 
love of ardent spirits. Nearly all the country is supplied 
from Mendoza because eastern Argentina is ill fitted for 
viticulture. The vineyards, interspersed with meadows 
of the bright blue-green alfalfa, give some beauty to 
the oasis, though the vines are mostly trained on sticks, 
not made to climb the poplar or mulberry as they do in 
north Italy. The land both north and south outside the 



264 SOUTH AMERICA 

range of irrigation is a sterile wilderness, except along 
the banks of a few streams that descend from the 
Andes, and to the east also it remains barren for a long 
way, bearing nothing except the algaroba tree, which is 
of use for firewood, but for little else. Travelling still 
farther eastward, one reaches a region where a moister 
climate gives grass sufficient for ranching, and thereafter, 
the rainfall growing more copious as one approaches 
the Atlantic, comes the region of those prodigious 
wheat fields which are now making the wealth of this 
country. 

Here in Argentina we were "on the other side of the 
hill/' in a social as well as in a physical sense, and we 
soon found ourselves trying to note the differences be- 
tween Chileans and Argentines, peoples of the same 
origin, dwelling side by side but divided by a lofty 
mountain chain. Two contrasts are evident. Chile is, 
always excepting Santiago and Valparaiso, a quiet tran- 
quil country, developing itself in a leisurely way. But 
in Mendoza, though it is one of the smaller Argentine 
towns, there is a stir and bustle like that of England or 
Germany or North America. Land values are going 
up. Branch fines of railway are being run through the 
outskirts of the city among the vineyards. The main 
streets are crowded, and there is a general air of " ex- 
pansion" and money making. Then in Chile the 
population is stable and comparatively homogeneous. 
The Germans who are found in some of the small south- 
ern towns have settled down and become completely 
domesticated. But here in Argentina the Italians who 



ACROSS THE ANDES 265 

flock in daily are conspicuous as a growing element, 
which is contributing effectively to the wealth of the 
country, for most of the immigrants are hard-working 
and intelligent people from Lombardy and Piedmont. 
To describe with precision the differences between the 
Argentines proper, that is to say, those of Spanish 
stock, and the Chileans, is not easy for a passing 
foreign visitor, nor can he attempt to judge whether 
the Chilean is justified in claiming that he is more 
frank and open, and the Argentine that he is more 
perfectly a child of his time. One does, however, re- 
ceive the impression that the Argentine, being usually 
better off, is more disposed to enjoy himself. In 
both nations Castilian courtesy has lost some of its 
elaborateness, but those who know both say that the 
change has tended to make the Chilean of the less 
educated class more abrupt even to the verge of brusque- 
ness, and the Argentine more offhand and "casual." 
The prosperous Argentine gathers money quickly and 
spends it freely; the Chilean retains the frugality of 
old Spain, and while the former is more vivacious, the 
latter is more solid. 

Placed on the edge of a monotonous desert, and far 
from all other cities, Mendoza may seem a depressing 
place to dwell in, yet it has some attractions for those 
to whom natural environment means something. At 
the end of those streets which open to the west 
glimpses are caught of the distant richly coloured 
mountains ; and the man who goes to and fro amidst 
the crowd on his daily tasks is reminded of the beauty 



266 SOUTH AMERICA 

of a far-off lonely nature. Then there is the view 
of the Andes from the southwestern outskirts of the 
city. It is a view specially noble just at sunrise, 
when the level light reddens the long line of ghostly 
snows that stretches south for more than a hundred 
miles from where the cone of Tupungato, towering 
above its fellows, is the first to catch the rays. It 
is like the view of the Alps from Turin, and even 
grander, since not only the height, but also the im- 
mense length of the Andean range, trending away 
towards distant Patagonia till its furthest peaks sink 
below the horizon, lays upon the imagination the spell 
of vastness and mystery. 

A third equally striking prospect is that over the 
Pampa from the high ground of the new park. There is 
something in looking over a boundless plain that in- 
spires more awe than even the grandest mountain 
landscape. The latter is limited, the former thrills the 
mind with a sense of infinity, land and sky meeting at 
a point which one cannot fix. There is little colour 
on this plain and little variety of aspect except that 
given by the shadows of the coursing clouds. But its 
uniformity seems to make it the more solemn. 

Over that plain lay our shortest way to Buenos 
Aires and Europe, along the fine of railroad that runs for 
hundreds of miles without a curve or a rise or a bridge, 
always steadily eastward to the sea. But it is a dull and 
dusty journey through a monotonous landscape, at first 
mostly desert, then mostly pasture, at last mostly 
wheat fields, but always flat as a table, possibly the 



ACROSS THE ANDES 267 

widest perfectly level plain in the whole world. And 
we had the stronger reason for not taking this route that 
it had been a main object of our journey to see the 
Straits of Magellan, that great sea highway from ocean 
to ocean, the finding and traversing of which was an 
achievement second only to the voyage of Columbus. So 
leaving Mendoza before dawn, we threaded the windings 
of the granite canon, and then, passing the little plain of 
Uspallata, took our way up the long volcanic Valley of 
Desolation, that leads to the pass, finding it not less 
strange and terrible than it had seemed two days be- 
fore. When we reached the Argentine end of the tunnel 
at Las Cuevas, we quitted the train in order to mount 
to and cross the top of the pass, the Cumbre, as it is 
called, which is fifteen hundred feet above, and over 
which, until the tunnel was pierced, all travellers walked 
or rode. The ridge is composed of friable volcanic rock, 
decomposed to a sort of coarse gravel, steep on both 
sides, but most so on the Argentine. The road, which, 
although rough, is still barely passable for light vehicles, 
is not likely long to remain so, as no one now crosses the 
ridge, unless indeed he wishes to see the statue on the 
top. 

We took mules, for in this thin air it is well to save 
effort by riding when one can, and as there was no 
vegetation, there could be no gathering of alpine plants. 
But more than once we had occasion to feel that we 
should have been happier on our feet, for in heading the 
animals across short cuts between the windings of the 
track we got on slopes so steep that it was a marvel how 



268 SOUTH AMERICA 

the creatures could keep their feet. It was now past 
midday, so a furious west wind was careering over this 
gap between the far loftier heights on either side, and 
making it hard for the mules to resist it, and for us to 
keep in the saddle. Once upset, one might have rolled 
down for hundreds of feet, for there was nothing for 
beast or rider to catch at. 

The Cumbre is a flattish ridge hardly a quarter of a 
mile across, with towers of rock rising on each side, the 
cold intense and no shelter anywhere from the biting blast. 
There is a small stone hut, but it was half full of snow. 
One thought of the hapless travellers of former days 
caught here in some blinding snowstorm far from human 
help. One recalled the daring march of that detachment 
of the Argentine army of San Martin, when, in 1817, they 
crossed the pass in that hero's expedition to deliver Chile 
from the yoke of Spain, the rest of his force having taken 
the equally difficult though less lofty route by the Los 
Patos Pass to the north of Aconcagua. The passages 
of the Alps by Hannibal and by Napoleon were over 
ridges only half as high and only half as far from the 
dwellings of men. 

The view to the west into Chile looking down into the 
abysmal depths of the valley that leads to Santa Rosa, 
with formidable spires and towers of rock nineteen 
thousand feet high rising on either hand, grand and 
terrible as it is, is less extensive and less imposing than 
that to the east into Argentina. Both Tupungato to 
the south and Aconcagua to the north are hidden by 
nearer heights, the latter by the huge Tolorsa, whose 



ACROSS THE ANDES 269 

cliff-crested slope descends in singularly beautiful lines to 
the hollow of Las Cuevas. But to the east are the two 
great ranges that enclose the valley, their forms less 
bold than those of the Chilean mountains to the west, 
where rain and snow wear down the softer rocks, and 
leave the crags standing up like great teeth, but their 
colours richer and more various. 

On the level summit of the pass stands the Christ of the 
Andes, a bronze statue of more than twice life size stand- 
ing on a stone pedestal rough hewn from the natural rock 
of the mountain. The figure, which is turned northwards 
so as to look over both countries and bless them with 
its uplifted right hand, is dwarfed by the vast scale 
of the surrounding pinnacles, and although there is 
dignity in the attitude and tenderness in the face, it 
hardly satisfies the conception one forms of what such 
a figure might be. Rarely does any modern represen- 
tation of the Redeemer approach the dignity and 
simplicity which the painters and sculptors of the Middle 
Ages and early Renaissance knew how to give. 1 But 
when one reflects on the feeling that placed this statue 
here and the meaning it has for the two peoples, it is pro- 
foundly impressive. There had been a long and bitter 
controversy between Chile and Argentina over the line of 
their boundary along the Andes, a controversy which 
more than once had threatened war. At last they agreed 
to refer the dispute to the arbitrament of Queen Victoria 

1 The finest representation I have ever seen is a twelfth-century 
mosaic figure of Christ in the apse of the Norman cathedral at Cef alu 
In Sicily. 



270 SOUTH AMERICA 

of Great Britain. A commission was authorized by hei 
and her successor to examine the documents which bore 
upon the question and to survey the frontier. After 
years of careful enquiry an award was delivered and a 
boundary line drawn in which both nations acquiesced. 
Grateful for their escape from what might have been a 
long and ruinous strife, they cast this figure out of the 
metal of cannon, and set up here this monument of peace 
and good-will, unique in its place and in its purpose, 
to be an everlasting witness between them. 

We descended the opposite side of the pass on foot 
in the teeth of the raging blast, taking short cuts across 
the broken rocks, and avoiding the steep snowbeds. 
At Caracoles, the stopping place at the Chilean end of 
the tunnel, the manager of the railway, a bright and 
pleasant young North American engineer, who had 
accompanied us over the top, and to whose courtesy we 
had been much beholden on the whole trip, proposed 
to run us down the first and steepest part of the de- 
scent to the station of Rio Blanco, on an open trolley. 
By now the sun was near his setting, but there would 
presently be some moon, so we welcomed the sugges- 
tion of this less familiar kind of locomotion and started 
in the waning light, sitting on a low bench back to back, 
so as to steady one another, while our friend the mana- 
ger took his seat on the edge of the little car and grasped 
the brake handle. We ran swiftly down the first steep 
incline to the Frozen Lake, while the orange glow of the 
sky was paling to a cold and steely grey, then out to the 
edge of the ridge which rises above Juncal, then down 



ACROSS THE ANDES 271 

into the black depths of the Juncal Valley, along the nar- 
row shelf cut out of the rock, rushing down the steep 
incline in and out of the tunnels. The tunnels were 
hardly blacker than the night without, for the moon 
was still hidden behind the peaks. At length she rose 
over the crags, just where the torrent comes down 
from behind Tupungato, and for the rest of our 
twenty-six miles we could by her help see a little way 
ahead, just enough to know if some block had fallen 
from above upon the rails. It was bitterly cold, but 
cold is more easily borne in this keen, dry air than in 
humid England, and sometimes we forgot it in noting 
how the trolley quickened or reduced its speed as the 
practised hand on the brake loosened it on a straight run 
or pressed it hard when we entered a dangerous curve. 
Twice before I had made similar descents, once down 
the Himalayan railway from Darjiling to Siliguri, and 
once through the dismal solitudes of the Bolan Pass 
in Beluchistan. But those were in broad daylight. To 
get the thrills of such a ride in their brimming fulness 
one must take it in the pale moonlight, passing into 
and out of the shadow of black crags as one spins along 
the ringing lines of steel. 

As it is here that I bid farewell to the Andes, this is 
a fitting place for some observations on their scenery, 
as compared with that of the mountain systems 
more familiar to most of us, such as the Alps and 
the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, in the Old World ; 
the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada in the 
New. It is, however, only of the central and southern 



272 SOUTH AMERICA 

parts of the Andes, and for the most part of their west- 
ern side, that I can speak, for I had no time to visit the 
valleys which descend into the forests of eastern Peru 
and Bolivia. But before I come to the scenery, let a 
few words be said upon the mountains from the 
climber's point of view, as offering a field for his 
energy and skill. 

The Andes are not only a longer and loftier chain 
than any of those just named, except the Himalayas, 
but are altogether on a vaster scale, the plateaux higher 
and wider, the valleys longer and deeper. Thus they 
bear what one may call a different ratio to man, — that 
is to say, his power of walking and climbing enables 
him to accomplish less in a given time in these two 
greater than in the lesser ranges. He is less able 
to cope with their heights and their distances, especially 
as above a certain height the rarity of the air reduces 
his powers. In Great Britain an active man can ascend 
two of the highest mountains in a day without fatigue. 
In the Alps a first-class peak demands the afternoon of 
one day and the forenoon of another. A little more 
time is required in the Caucasus, a little less in the 
Pyrenees or the Tatra. But in the central Andes he 
may probably have to give several days to one ascent, 
so much more effort is required to reach the summit 
from his base of operations. A coup de main is seldom 
possible; one must allow plenty of time and make 
elaborate preparations. 

When huge mountains with spreading bases stand 
apart from one another, they less frequently combine to 



ACROSS THE ANDES 273 

form a landscape perfect in the variety of its features" 
than do the mountains of lower ranges. Size is only 
one element in grandeur. A single peak, or even one 
of its precipices, may be sublime in the boldness of 
its lines and its enormous bulk, yet too isolated for 
that kind of beauty which lies either in the com- 
bination of fine lines or in the contrast of rich colours. 
A mountain that rises alone in a desolate region, strewn 
with tumbled rocks and ancient moraines, or, if it 
be a volcano, with fields of ashes and lava spreading 
miles from its base, may want the elements which make 
the charm of scenery in Europe or the temperate parts 
of North America. Andean peaks are often seen best 
a long way off, so that they fall into groups or show 
one behind the other, giving variety of position and 
contrast of form. Then, the unlovely heaps of 
gravel and stones or ash cease to deface the landscape, 
because distance, touching them with delicate colour, 
gives them a beauty not their own. 

These atmospheric effects are of supreme value in the 
scenery of the arid parts of South America, in which one 
may include nearly all of the higher Peruvian, Bolivian, 
and North Argentine Andes. Such a dryness as belongs 
to the Pacific coast and to the central plateau from 
Titicaca southward into the desert of Atacama with- 
draws an element which gives half their charm to the 
best parts of Europe, for it forbids grass to clothe the 
hillsides and groves to break the monotony of plains. 
From the Equator till one reaches central Chile, there 
is scarcely any water in Andean landscapes, very few 



274 SOUTH AMERICA 

lakes, except Titicaca, few rivers, and those rivers 
usually torrents, raging at the bottom of deep gorges, 
where they are heard, but scarcely seen. There is, 
except in the deeper valleys, no wood, seldom even such 
glossy shrubs or stunted and gnarled trees as one 
finds on the dry isles and coasts of the iEgean and the 
Levant, or on the equally dry hills of California and 
Arizona. Neither, except in a few upland valleys, is 
there any verdure of grassy slopes. Green, the softest 
and most tender of hues, is almost wholly absent from 
the great ranges and the plateau. On the eastern side 
of the Andes there is, indeed, vegetation enough and 
to spare, but once plunged into the forest all distant 
views are lost, for it is everywhere so thick that neither 
it nor the mountains above can be seen at all. Except 
when cresting a ridge, the traveller swelters under an 
unbroken roof of impenetrable foliage. 

What redeems the scenery of the high Andes is the 
richness and delicacy of the colours which the brilliant 
desert light gives to distant objects. A black peak be- 
comes deep purple; a slope of dry, grey earth takes a 
tender lilac; and evening as it falls transfigures the stones 
that strew the sides of a valley with a soft glow. The 
snow sparkles and glitters at noonday and flushes in 
sunset with a radiance unknown to our climates. This 
is what replaces for these regions the charm of the thick 
woods and marshy pools of New England, of the deep 
grassed river meadows of France, or the heathery hillsides 
of Scotland, and brightens the sternness of those vast 
prospects which the Cordillera affords. Yet it cannot 



ACROSS THE ANDES 275 

make them inspire the sort of affection we feel for the 
mountains of temperate countries, with their constant 
changes from rain to sunlight, their fresh streams and 
bubbling springs, and flowers starring the high pastures. 
So the finest things in the Andes are either the views 
of a single giant peak, like that of Aconcagua, de- 
scribed a few pages back, or some distant prospect of 
a great mountain group or range, such as that of the 
snowy line of the Cordillera Real as it rises beyond 
Titicaca, or the volcanic peaks of Arequipa seen from 
the desert of the coast. 

It follows from what has been said that the Andes 
offer a much less favourable field for the landscape 
painter than do the lower mountains of European 
countries, such as Scotland or Norway, or the Pyrenees 
or Apennines. The nearer and lesser beauties which the 
painter loves are just those which are here wanting. 
Sometimes one finds landscapes which some master of 
the grand style might place upon a large canvas. Several 
such there are in the Vilcanota Valley, especially below 
Sicuani, and still further down at Ollantaytambo. But 
the want of what is called " atmosphere" and the com- 
parative scarcity of the objects which make good fore- 
grounds are serious disadvantages. Grandeur and 
wildness, not beauty, are the note of these regions. 
Immense depths and heights, vast spaces, too bleak 
and bare for human life, lying between the habitable 
valleys, the sense of tremendous forces at work piling 
up huge volcanic cones, of unthinkable periods of time 
during which the hard rocks have been crumbling 



276 SOUTH AMERICA 

away and fathomless gorges have been excavated by 
rivers, — these are the things of which the Andes speak, 
and they speak to the imagination rather than to the 
sense of beauty. They are awesome, not loveable. 

It is with European scenery, as that likely to be most 
familiar to my readers, that I have been trying to com- 
pare the scenery of the Cordilleras. But a word may 
be added about the Himalayas, since they, too, are on 
a great scale and the fitter to be compared to the Andes 
because near, though not actually within, the tropics. 

They resemble the Andes in being too vast for beauty 
and for the sort of enjoyment to be derived from wander- 
ing among mountains of a moderate size, whose heights 
one can reach with no excessive fatigue. It is even 
more difficult in them than in the Cordilleras to explore 
the valleys and reach the base of the great summits. 
They offer some prospects wider and grander than any in 
South America, such as that from Phalut on the borders 
of Nepal and Sikkim, where forty peaks, each of which 
exceeds twenty thousand feet, stand up east, north, and 
west of the beholder. 1 ' The capital difference between 
the two chains, besides that difference in the forms which 
arises from geological character, the Himalayas being 
composed of ancient crystalline rocks, while many of 
the high Andes are of volcanic origin, lies in the fact 
that the south side of the Himalayas receives abun- 
dance of rain and is covered with dense forests. This 

1 The distant view of Badrinath and Trisul from the heights 
above Naini Tal in Kumaon is also quite as imposing as anything 
we saw in the Andes. 



ACROSS THE ANDES 277 

adds to the sublimity of the great Himalayan views 
a certain measure of beauty which the Andes lack. 
On the other hand those effects of colour on bare sur- 
faces which belong to dryness and a powerful sun, 
are absent in the parts of the Himalayas which front 
toward India. When one passes behind the outer peaks 
into the great tableland of Tibet, physical conditions 
resembling those of the Andean deserts appear ; and the 
same remark applies to the inner valleys of the north- 
western Himalaya, such as that of the upper Indus. 
The parallel may be carried further, for just as the 
Himalayan chain has a dry side, that turned to the 
lofty northern plateau of Tibet, so the Andean Cordil- 
lera has a wet side, its eastern, turned to the Amazonian 
forests. This side I have not seen, but gather from 
those who have that its rock and river scenery is 
superbly beautiful in the valleys, but that it is more 
difficult than in the Himalayas to obtain a distant view 
of the great range, because the points are few at which 
one can get above the forest. 

Europe, although the smallest, is, in point of the 
accessibility, and of what may be called the service- 
ability to man, of its beauty, the most fortunate of the 
continents. Less grand and extensive than either the 
Himalayas or the Andes, the Alps have more of varied 
charm, and contain more of mingled magnificence and 
loveliness than any other mountain chain. It would 
lead me too far afield to discuss the respective merits 
of South American and of North American scenery. 
But those who have seen both will agree that there is 



278 SOUTH AMERICA 

nothing in the Andes which better combines beauty with 
majesty than the Yosemite and its sister canons in the 
Sierra Nevada of California, and nothing so extraor- 
dinary as the Grand Canon of the Colorado River in 
Arizona. 

It may seem more natural to compare the Andean 
Plateau with what most nearly corresponds to it in North 
America, the plateau of Anahuac, in the centre of which 
he the lakes and the city of Mexico. The northern parts 
of that country are for the most part bare mountains 
and barren desert, but on this plateau seven thousand 
feet above sea level there is rain enough to give fertile 
fields and woods and a profusion of flowers upon the 
hillsides. There is the brilliant sunlight of the tropics 
without their too rank vegetation. Ranges of craggy 
hills traverse it, and a few great snowy cones, such as 
Popocatepetl and Citlaltetepl (near the town of Orizava), 
rise in solitary grandeur from its surface to a height of 
seventeen thousand feet. The presence together of all 
these elements creates landscapes of surpassing beauty. 
Even in Italy and on the coasts of Asia Minor I have 
seen nothing equal to the views of the plain and lakes 
of Mexico from the castle of Chapultepec and the views 
of the broad valley of Cuernavaca either from that 
city or from the heights around it. These landscapes 
are not only lovely in their combination of hill and plain, 
of rock and forest, with snowclad summits closing the 
distance: they are also "in the grand style," ample 
and harmonious landscapes such as one has in the 
greatest pieces of Claude Lorrain or Turner. Whether 



ACROSS THE ANDES 279 

there are any equal to these on the east side of the 
Andes I cannot say. Those on the west side have 
equal amplitude and equal grandeur, but not such 
finished beauty. 

Can a lover of nature in general and of mountains in 
particular be advised to take the long journey to western 
South America for the sake of its scenery ? If he be a 
mountain climber who enjoys exploration and pants 
for yet untrodden peaks, he will find an almost un- 
touched sphere for his energies, summits of all degrees 
of difficulty from eighteen thousand to twenty-two 
thousand feet, with the advantage of having at certain 
times of the year uninterruptedly fine weather and a 
marvellously clear air. If, not aiming so high, he 
nevertheless loves natural beauty enough not to regard 
some discomforts, and if, having a sound heart and lungs, 
he does not fear great altitudes, he will be repaid by 
seeing something different in kind from anything which 
the mountains of Europe and North America and Africa 
have to shew, and the like of which can be seen only 
in the Himalaya and the even less approachable desert 
ranges of central Asia, such as the Thian-Shan and 
Kuen-Lun. The Andes have a character that is all 
their own, while in the temperate region of the South 
Chilean Cordillera one finds landscapes which, while not 
so unlike as are the Peruvian to those of western Europe 
and the Pacific coast of North America, have also a 
charm peculiar to themselves, which will endear them 
to the memory of whoever has traversed their flowery 
forests and sailed upon their snow-girt lakes. 



280 SOUTH AMERICA 

NOTE TO CHAPTER VII 

GENERAL SAN MARTIN'S PASSAGE OF THE ANDES 

The passage of the Andes by the army of San Martin has been 
pronounced by military historians of authority to have been one 
of the most remarkable operations ever accomplished in mountain 
warfare. The forces which he led were no doubt small compared 
to those which Suvarof and Macdonald commanded in their famous 
Swiss campaigns, and small also when compared to those which 
Hannibal and Napoleon carried across the Alps. But the valleys 
which the two detachments of San Martin's army had to traverse 
lay in an arid and practically uninhabited region, and the passes 
to be crossed were much higher. This added immensely to the 
hardships and difficulties of the march, yet few men were lost. 
'■ San Martin divided his army into two parts. The smaller, in 
charge of Colonel Las Heras, consisted of eight hundred men, in- 
cluding two field guns and a few cavalry. It proceeded by the 
Uspallata Pass, over the Cumbre, while the larger, under San Mar- 
tin himself, moved by the much longer and colder though not quite 
so lofty route over the pass of Los Patos to the north of Aconcagua. 
The rendezvous was successfully effected at the exact point chosen 
by San Martin, where the two fines of march down the two valleys on 
the Chilean side of the Cordillera converge a little below the village 
of Santa Rosa de los Andes, now the terminus of the Trans-Andine 
railway. San Martin, screened by the Andes, had from his position 
at Mendoza so skilfully contrived to deceive and perplex the com- 
mander of the Spanish army in Chile as to induce him to scatter 
his greatly superior force over much too long a line, so as to guard 
the various passes, all very difficult, which lie to the south of the 
Uspallata. Thus when San Martin, having effected his own con- 
centration near Santa Rosa, marched straight upon Santiago, he 
was able to overpower the Spanish army, still somewhat larger 
than his own, when it tried to bar his path at Chacabuco. The 
Spanish general fled to the coast, and though some time had yet 
to pass before San Martin won his decisive victory at Maipo, and 
before Lord Cochrane drove the Spaniards out of their last mari- 
time strongholds at Corral, the crossing of the Andes was not only 



ACROSS THE ANDES 281 

the most brilliant operation of the whole war, but was also that 
which most contributed to the liberation of Chile and Peru. 

The best account I have been able to find of this campaign is in 
Mitre's elaborate Historia de San Martin, with the accompanying 
volumes of Documentos. The description there given of the cross- 
ing of the passes is, however, sadly wanting in topographical de- 
tails. 

Jose de San Martin, a strong and silent man, whose character 
and achievements have been little known or appreciated outside 
his own country, had learnt war under the Duke of Wellington in 
Spain. He comes nearer than any one else to being the George 
Washington of Spanish America. 



CHAPTER VIII 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 



In the annals of maritime discovery three great 
voyages stand out as the most daring in their incep- 
tion, the most striking in their incidents, the most 
momentous in their results. They are those of Colum- 
bus in 1492, of Vasco da Gama to the coast of India 
in 1498, of Magellan in 1519-1522, and of these three, 
Magellan's was in some ways the most wonderful. It 
was by far the longest, and was performed under hard- 
ships and sufferings which were absent from the others. 
Vasco da Gama had a powerful armament, could ob- 
tain pilots, and knew where he was going. Columbus 
had a short and easy crossing, though it was into an 
unknown region. But Magellan ventured down into 
the stormiest seas of our globe, and after he had found 
a channel leading through savage solitudes to the Pacific, 
had eight thousand miles of ocean to traverse before he 
sighted those Asiatic isles among which he found his 
fate. As the interest of the Straits, apart from the 
grandeur of their scenery, lies largely in the circum- 
stances of their discovery and the heroic character of 
the man who first proved experimentally (so to speak) 
that our earth is a globe, a few lines may be given to 
some account of his exploit before I describe the channel 
itself. 

282 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 283 

Columbus seems to have set forth not so much to 
discover new countries as to find a shorter way to 
India from the west than that known to exist via the 
Red Sea, 1 and which Bartholomew Diaz, by passing the 
Cape of Good Hope, had almost proved to exist round 
Africa. As James Russell Lowell happily said, " mean- 
ing to enter the back door of the Old World, Columbus 
knocked at the front door of a New World." To the 
end of his life, after four voyages, in two of which he 
coasted for hundreds of miles along the shores of what 
we now call Central and South America, he continued to 
believe that he had reached the Indies, though he had 
not been able to hit upon any one of the islands or dis- 
tricts supposed to exist there. When it began to be 
clear that there were masses of land extending a long 
way to the north and south of the part which Columbus 
had first struck, men tried to find a way through this 
land by which Asia, still supposed to be quite near, 
might be reached. Portuguese and Spanish navigators 
followed the coast of what we call South America a long 
way to the south, while others explored northwards. In 
1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus of 
Darien, discovered the Pacific Ocean, which he called the 
South Sea; and it began to be conjectured that there 
might well be a great space of water to be crossed be- 
fore India could be reached, though nothing shewed how 
wide it was or whether it was anywhere connected with 

1 Whether the discovery of India was- his original aim, a point re- 
cently brought into question, there is no doubt that he thought after 
his first voyage that he had found some part of eastern Asia. 



284 SOUTH AMERICA 

the Atlantic. Six years later, in 1519, Magellan was 
commissioned by Charles, king of Spain (not yet 
the Emperor Charles V) to try to find a passage from 
the Atlantic into the sea which washed eastern Asia and 
so to reach, if possible, the rich Spice islands (the Mo- 
luccas) already known to lie off the Asiatic coast. He 
sailed with three ships in August of that year, and began 
his search for a westward passage at the Rio de la Plata, 
which had already been reached (in 1516) by Spanish 
sailors. He wintered on the coast of Patagonia at a 
spot where Francis Drake also spent the winter fifty- 
eight years later, and on the 21st of October, being the 
day of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, sighted a low prom- 
ontory which he called after those saints and which is 
still the Cape Virgenes of our charts. Just beyond and 
inside this promontory there opens to the west an inlet 
of the sea, which he sent two ships to explore. They 
seem, from the description given by Pigaf etta, the Italian 
chronicler of the expedition, who was on board, to have 
gone through two channels, now called the First and Sec- 
ond Narrows, into the great piece of open water oppo- 
site the place we call Punta Arenas (though possibly they 
stopped at the entrance of the Second Narrows), and they 
returned thence with an account so favourable that Ma- 
gellan entered the strait on All Saints Day (November 1). 
Had he not found it, his purpose was to sail on steadily 
southward till he reached latitude 75° south. Long before 
that he would have been stopped by the frozen shores 
of Graham Land, nor did any one get down to latitude 
75° till 1823. He passed both Narrows, crossed the 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 285 

open piece of water, and then, halting at a point where 
the channel forks, he sent out two of his ships to ex- 
amine the southeasterly one while he took the south- 
western. Thereafter, stopping again, and making a 
pilot climb a hill to see if the channel came to an end, 
he sent on boats to explore further. They returned — so 
says Pigafetta 1 — in three days and reported that they 
had seen a cape and beyond it open sea. Thereupon 
Magellan cast loose from the shore to which he was 
moored and with two out of his three ships (for one of 
those sent to reconnoitre had deserted and gone back to 
Spain) sailed out to the west, and on November 28 en- 
tered the Pacific. When he perceived that there was a 
vast sea before him, he called the cape Deseado (the de- 
sired) and wept for joy. Thence, turning first north and 
then northwest, he got into the southeast trade-wind, 
and sped along before it, making from fifty to seventy 
leagues a day. Before this steady breeze he sailed for 
three months and twenty days over the boundless waste 
of waters, his crews reduced to the last extremity by fam- 
ine and scurvy, till he reached the Ladrone Islands. 
"Had not God and His Blessed Mother given us good 
weather," says the Italian chronicler, " we should all 
have died of hunger in that exceeding vast sea. I do 
not believe that any such voyage will ever be made 
again." Perhaps it was because the subsequent suffer- 
ings made their time in the Straits seem agreeable by 

1 Unless Magellan had got farther to the west than the rest of the 
narrative would imply, three days seems a short time for the boats 
to proceed to the western opening and back again. 



286 SOUTH AMERICA 

comparison that Pigaf etta has nothing but good to say 
of the latter. "There were," he says, "safe ports every 
half league, and plenty of water and good wood. I do 
not believe there is a more beautiful country or a bettei 
strait than that in the world." 

Sir Francis Drake, whose passage of the Straits in 
1578, on his famous circumnavigation of the globe, 
seems to have been the next recorded one after Ma- 
gellan's, got through in sixteen days, but encountered 
frightful weather when he emerged into the Pacific, which 
drove him a long way south, perhaps nearly as far as 
Cape Horn. 1 The passage from east to west which 
Magellan and Drake took is more impressive than that 
from west to east, because it begins between low shores 
in quiet and even tame scenery, which rises into gran- 
deur as one approaches the Pacific. We, however, had 
to take the Strait the opposite way, and so I will de- 
scribe it. 

The last Chilean port at which the ocean-going 
steamers bound for the Atlantic call is Lota, near Talca- 
huano, of which I have already spoken (see page 227). 
From this it is a voyage of three days to the west 
end of the Strait. The steamer keeps so far out that 
in the cloudy weather which usually prevails it is only 
at intervals that one can see the lofty hills. This is one 
of the wettest and windiest parts of the Pacific, and it 
is in this region, between latitude 45° south and Cape 
Horn, that seas heavier than elsewhere in the world 
are apt to be encountered. We had the usual weather, 

1 Cape Horn was discovered in 1616 by Van Schouten and Le 
Maire sailing from the East. 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 287 

cold and wet, with a southwest wind which some- 
times rose to three-quarters of a gale. It is, however, 
a good rule to keep the deck whenever you can do so 
without the risk of being drenched or perhaps knocked 
down and swept along by a wave coming on board; 
and the want of anything else to occupy the eyes was 
compensated by the delight of watching the flocks of 
sea-birds which followed and circled round the ship 
day after day. Chief among them was the albatross, 
whose aspect is that of a gigantic gull. There were 
usually two or three, and, as has often been observed, 
they seemed scarcely to move their wings, but to float 
along, rising and falling without effort and often mov- 
ing faster than the ship, of which they usually kept 
astern. Steady as was their flight, it would have 
needed a good marksman to hit one with a cross-bow, 
had such a weapon been by ill luck on board. Among 
the other birds, — there were at least forty or fifty 
playing round the ship, but it was impossible to count 
them accurately, — the largest was the giant petrel 
or "bone breaker," which somewhat resembles an 
albatross, save that he is dark, and the handsomest 
was the so-called Cape pigeon. He is bigger than a 
pigeon and no more like one than is implied by the fact 
that he is more like a pigeon than a gull. The grace 
of his circling flight, and the black or dark brown 
spots on the dazzling white of his wings, made it a 
constant pleasure to watch him, but it was hard either 
to follow the course of any particular bird or to be 
sure that our count of the spots was correct. When 



288 SOUTH AMERICA 

any remains of food were thrown overboard, the whole 
swarm darted at once upon it, fluttering and clutter- 
ing together on the surface of the sea, with much splash- 
ing and jostling, but never, so far as we could observe, 
fighting with one another. Even the great albatross did 
not seem to abuse his strength against the Cape pigeon. 
When they had seized what they could, all easily over- 
took the ship, though by that time perhaps two or 
three hundred yards away. The dulness of three 
tempestuous days under gloomy skies was redeemed 
by the joy of watching these beautiful creatures, happy 
in having their lot cast on a wild and lonely coast, 
where they are safe from the predatory instincts of man. 
This long line of islands, stretching along the coast 
from Chiloe seven hundred miles to the opening of 
the Straits, is practically uninhabited, though a few 
wretched Indians wandering about in canoes support 
life by fishing. Between the isles and the mainland is 
a labyrinth of sounds and bays studded with other 
islands, great and small, all covered with wood so close 
and thick as to be almost impenetrable. The scenery, 
especially towards the south in the long inland sea 
called Smyth's Channel, has excited the admiration of 
those few travellers who have been fortunate enough 
to see it. This we had hoped to do, but found that the 
German steamers which used to take the route through 
these channels into the Straits had ceased to do so 
on account of the dangers of the navigation, there being 
so much fog and rain, such strong and uncertain cur- 
rents, and so many sunken rocks that even with the help 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 289 

of the charts which the British Admiralty has published, 
it is hazardous to move except in broad daylight. Light- 
houses there are none. One line of small steamers does 
run from Punta Arenas in the Straits through the chan- 
nels up to the south Chilean ports, but to have waited 
for a boat of this line would have involved a month's 
delay, so we had to comfort ourselves by reflecting 
that had we been able to catch a vessel traversing this 
fairyland of wood and water and snowpeaks rising above 
land-locked fjords, still the chances of weather good 
enough to enable it to be seen and enjoyed would have 
been slender. For a description of it the reader may 
be referred to the book of Mr. Ball. 1 Were it not so far 
from the countries where rich men own yachts, it 
would be a superb yachting ground for those who could 
spare the time to explore its recesses, moving only by 
day, and with unceasing circumspection. 

Among the headlands which we saw along this stern 
and lofty coast, two were especially striking from their 
height and form. One is called Tres Montes. Heavy 
clouds hid its top, but two thousand feet were visible 
of the steep face that rose above the sea. Further 
south the huge tabular mass of Cape St. George, grand 
and grey in its drapery of mists, looked out over bil- 
lows, the spray of whose crests as they broke upon the 
rocks could be seen fifteen miles away. There is not 
in the world a coast more terrible than this. No hope 
for a ship driven in against it by the strong currents 
and the resistless western swell. Still further south, 

1 Notes of a Naturalist in South America. 
u 



290 SOUTH AMERICA 

on the fourth day of our voyage, after a night in which 
the vessel, steady sea boat as she was, rolled so heavily 
that it was hard to avoid being pitched out of one's berth, 
we reached a group of high rocky islands, called the 
Evangelists, — they seem from a distance to be four, 
but are really five, — on which the Chilean government 
has lately, in spite of the difficulty of landing in an 
always troubled sea, erected a lighthouse. Its fight, 
190 feet high, is visible for thirty miles, and was 
greatly needed, for vessels found it hard in the 
thick weather that is frequent here to make the 
entrance to the Straits. The group is conspicuous 
by a hole through one of the highest cliffs, and a long 
curved and contorted stratum of white quartz along 
the face of another. Not even on the coast of Norway 
can I remember anything grander than this wild 
sea, flashing and seething round these lonely isles. 
No other land was in sight, though the blackness of a 
distant cloud shewed that there were hills behind 
it. An hour and a half later there loomed up in 
the south, through driving rain-clouds, a dark mass 
which presently revealed itself as a tower of rock 
springing out of the sea, with crag rising above 
crag to a lofty peak behind. This rock tower — Cape 
Pilar — marks the entrance to the Straits. Beyond 
it an ironbound coast runs down four hundred miles 
southeast to Cape Horn. It is a coast which ships 
seldom see, for steamers, of course, prefer the Straits; 
and the very few sailing vessels that still come round 
this way to the Atlantic from San Francisco or Val- 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 291 

paraiso or Australia give a wide berth to these savage 
and storm-swept shores. When we had gone some ten 
miles further, the steamer turned her course eastward, 
and entered the opening, about fifteen miles wide, be- 
tween Cape Pilar on the south and Cape Formosa on 
the north. We were now on the track of Magellan, for 
Pilar is the cape which he saw and named the Desired 
Cape (Cabo Deseado) when the seaway opening to the 
west assured him that the ocean he was seeking had 
been found. Standing high on the bow of our ship and 
looking along it as it plunged in the great rollers, how 
small this ocean steamer seemed compared to the vast 
landscape around. Yet how much tinier were the two 
vessels with which Magellan ventured out into the bil- 
lows of an unknown sea. 

Before us the inlet narrowed to a point scarcely- 
seen in the vaporous haze. To the south the bare 
peaks of Desolation Island, beginning from Cape Pilar, 
rose with terrific boldness, unscaleable shafts and tow- 
ers of rock that recalled the shapes of the Coolin hills 
in Skye or the still loftier summits of the Lofoten Isles 
in Norway. To the north a mysterious fringe of 
islands and foam-girt reefs, grey and dim among their 
mists, hid the entrance to Smyth's Channel and the 
labyrinth of almost unexplored sounds and inlets along 
the Chilean coast beyond. Behind us the sun, now 
near his setting, threw from among the scattering clouds 
a flood of yellow light over the white-topped surges that 
were racing in our wake. One thought of Magellan's 
tears of joy when these long surges on which his little 



292 SOUTH AMERICA 

vessel rose told him that here at last was that ocean he 
had set forth to find and over which lay the path of 
glory that for him led only to the grave. Such a 
moment was worth a lifetime. 

As our ship passed further and further in between 
the narrowing shores, the birds began to drop away 
from us, first the great albatross, which loves the open 
sea, and then the smaller kinds. So, too, the billows 
slowly subsided, though the wind was still strong and 
the water still deep and the sea wide open behind us, 
until when we had gone some fifteen miles beyond Cape 
Pilar the ocean swell was scarcely perceptible. 

Among the isles on the north side of the Strait the 
most conspicuous is that to which, from its high-gabled 
central ridge, the name of Westminster Hall has been 
given. It seemed strange to find in this remote region 
nearly all the headlands, bays, and channels bearing 
English names, but the explanation is simple. As 
there were no native names at all, the Fuegians not hav- 
ing reached that grade of civilization in which distinc- 
tive proper names are given to places, and extremely few 
Spanish names, because the colonial government never 
surveyed the Straits and few colonial vessels entered 
them, the British naval officers who did their hydro- 
graphic work in and around the Fuegian archipelago 
were obliged to find names. Like Cook and Van- 
couver in the north Pacific they bestowed upon places 
the names of their ships, or of their brother seamen, or of 
persons connected with the British Admiralty at home. 
Hence Smyth's Channel and Cockburn Channel and 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 293 

Croker Peninsula and Beagle Sound and Cape Fitzroy 
and Fury Island and Mount Darwin. The Dutch cap- 
tains, sea-rovers or whalers, have contributed other 
names, such as Barnevelt Island and Staten Island and 
Nassau Bay and Cape Horn itself. Thus a chart has 
here the sort of historic interest which the plan of an 
old city has, where the names of streets and squares speak 
of the persons who were famous when each was built, 
like Queen Anne Street and Harley Street and Wel- 
lington Street in London, or the list of Napoleonic 
victories which one has in the street names of Paris. 
The Admiralty surveys have also named the different 
parts of the long line of the Straits. First comes, 
beginning from the westward, Sea Reach, which, nar- 
rowing gradually till it is about four miles wide, has 
a length of about thirty miles; then Long Reach, thirty- 
five miles long, and averaging two to three miles wide; 
then the shorter, and in parts narrower, Crooked 
Reach, and English Reach, which brings one to Cape 
Froward, nearly halfway to the Atlantic. Darkness 
fell before we came to the end of Sea Reach, and we 
had our last view of the range of formidable pinnacles 
and precipices which, beginning from Cape Pilar, run 
along the shore of Desolation Island, the northernmost 
of the mountainous isles that lie between the Straits 
and Cape Horn. It is separated from the two isles 
next to it on the southeast by channels so narrow that 
the three were long supposed to form one island. The 
peaks, some of them apparently inaccessible, are 
of bare rock and run up to four thousand feet. On 



294 SOUTH AMERICA 

the slopes near the shore there is a little short grass, 
but no wood, so violent and unceasing are the winds. 
The sea was absolutely solitary. For three days we had 
seen no ship. Formerly a few Fuegians in their canoes 
haunted these shores, but they now come no longer. 
Scattered remnants of their small tribes, Yahgans and 
Alakalufs, wander along the shores of the more south- 
erly islands, supporting existence on shell-fish and 
wild berries. With the exception of the now all but 
extinct Bushmen of South Africa and the Veddas of 
Ceylon, they are the lowest kind of savage known to 
exist, going almost or quite naked, rigorous as is the 
climate, possessing no dwellings, and having learned 
from civilized man nothing except a passion for to- 
bacco. There are missionaries at work among them 
who have done what can be done to ameliorate their 
lot, which would be even more wretched if they knew 
it to be wretched. They would appear, from the vast 
remains of their ancient middens, to have inhabited these 
inhospitable regions for untold ages, and their low state 
contrasts remarkably with the superior intelligence 
and the progress in some of the arts of life which mark 
the Lapps and Esquimaux and other barbarous tribes 
of regions far nearer to the North Pole than this is to the 
South. The contrast may possibly be due to the greater 
scarcity of wild creatures both on land and sea in this 
extremity of South America. 1 Here are no bears, black 

1 It is hardly necessary to refer for information regarding the 
Fuegians to the classic book of Charles Darwin, the Voyage of the 
Beagle, in which the genius for observation and speculation of that 
great man was first made known to the world. 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 295 

or brown or polar, and no creature like the reindeer of 
Lapland, and no musk-ox ; nor has the dog ever been 
harnessed. 

Next morning we were up on the bridge beside 
our friendly captain at the first glimmer of dawn. 
The vessel, going at half speed during the night, had 
covered no great distance, but the character of the 
scenery had already changed. Here in Long Reach 
the Strait was only three miles wide. The spiry pin- 
nacles of Desolation Island had been replaced by 
mountains nearly or quite as high, but of more rounded 
forms, their faces breaking down sometimes in cliffs, 
but more frequently in steep, bare slopes of rock to 
the deep waters, their glens filled with blue glaciers, 
which sometimes came within two hundred yards of 
the sea, their upper slopes covered with snow or nev6, 
which seemed to form vast ice fields stretching far 
back inland. Clouds lay heavy on these snows, so 
only here and there could one discern the outlines of 
a peak, and conjecture its height. The tops seemed to 
average from twenty-five hundred to four thousand 
feet, and the level of the fine of perpetual snow to be 
somewhat over three thousand feet, varying according to 
the exposure, the line being, of course, a little higher on 
the south side, whose slopes face the north. On the lower 
declivities towards the sea there was now some grass, 
and in sheltered places, such as the heads of inlets, a 
little thick, low scrub of trees, probably of the two 
Antarctic beeches, 1 which are here the commonest trees. 

1 Fagus (or Nothofagus) betuloides, or Fagus antarctica. 



296 SOUTH AMERICA 

What most struck us was the similarity of the mountain 
lines and their general character to those of the extreme 
north of Norway, between Tromso and the North Cape. 
Everything seemed to point to an epoch when the 
glaciers, formerly more extensive than now, rounded off 
the tops of the ridges, and smoothed the surfaces, just 
as one finds them rounded and smoothed along the 
Lyngen fjord on this side the North Cape. It is also 
natural to' suppose that rain and wind, which seem to 
be less copious and less violent in this part of the 
Straits than at their western opening, have done less 
here than they do there to carve the peaks into sharp 
spires and jagged precipices. 

The day, when it came, was dark, for a grey pall 
of cloud covered sea and mountains; but as this was the 
usual weather, and suited the sternness of the land- 
scape, we regretted only the impossibility of seeing the 
tops of the highest hills that rose out of the undulating 
snow plateau which lies back from the shores. Very 
solemn was this long, slightly winding channel, deep and 
smooth, broken rarely by an island or a rock, but now 
and then shewing a seductive little bay with a patch of 
green. Sometimes in a glen running back to the foot of 
a glacier one caught the white flash of a waterfall. 
The remarkable purity of the ice and smallness of the 
moraines may be attributed to the fact that the glaciers 
seemed to be seldom overhung by cliffs whence stone 
would fall, and that the rocks were evidently extremely 
hard. They seemed to belong to the ancient crystalline 
group, granite and gneiss or mica schist, with masses of 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 297 

white quartz, shewing no trace anywhere of volcanic 
action. This region on both sides of the Straits may 
be a prolongation not of the great Andean Cordillera, 
but of the Coast Range of Chile, which (as already 
observed) mostly consists of those older rocks which 
I have just mentioned. 

At Crooked Reach the view, looking back westward, 
was specially noble. On a green slope above a sheltered 
inlet upon the south side are a few houses, the melan- 
choly remains of a Swiss colony, founded some twenty 
years ago, which failed to support itself in this inclement 
nature. Behind there was a long curtain-like line of 
snows. On the north two or three small isles fringed 
the steep rocky shore with a background of peaks 
dimly seen through drifting snow showers. In the 
middle the eye rested on the smooth, grey-blue surface 
of the great waterway, here only a mile wide, dark 
as the clouds above and darker still in spots where a 
gust from the hill fell upon it, silent as when Magel- 
lan's prow first clove it. For steam vessels the naviga- 
tion is not dangerous, since, though there are in this 
narrow part no lights, there are few sunken rocks. 
A rock is always indicated by the masses of very long, 
yellowish brown seaweed which root on it and wave in 
the tide. But squalls or williwaws (as they are called) 
come down from the glens with terrific suddenness, and 
the water is so deep that it is often hard to anchor, or 
to keep the ship, if anchored, from dragging. Magellan 
moored his vessels to the shore every night. How did 
he manage to get through so quickly, against the pre- 



298 SOUTH AMERICA 

vailing west winds, by tacking in a channel so narrow, 
especially as in those days mariners could not sail so 
near the wind as we do? Perhaps he may have made 
much use of the tide, mooring when it was against him 
and pushing ahead when the ebb set out to the Pacific. 
The tide flow is, however, not so strong here as is that 
which enters on the Atlantic side, and it there rises to a 
much greater height. 

About this point another change comes over the 
scenery. There begins to be more wood, and though 
it is still stunted, one notes patches of it up to 
eight hundred feet. On the north shore more recent 
sedimentary strata, apparently of sandstone and lime- 
stone, replace the gneiss, and a growth of herbaceous 
plants and ferns drapes the face of the cliffs. Then 
at the end of English Reach rises a bold headland, 
Cape Froward, twelve hundred feet high, projecting 
from the much loftier Mount Victoria behind. It marks 
the southernmost extremity of the South American 
Continent in latitude 52°. Here the coast-fine, which 
had been running in a generally east southeasterly 
direction all the way from the Pacific, turns sharply 
to the north, and in a few miles a new scene is disclosed. 
The Strait widens out, an open expanse of water 
is seen to the northeast with a low shore scarcely 
visible behind it; and to the south, nearly opposite 
Cape Froward, a channel diverges to the southeast be- 
tween high mountains on its west side and lower hills on 
the east. This is the north end of Cockburn Channel, 
which, after many windings among islands, opens out 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 299 

southwestward into the Pacific, and this seems to be 
the place where Magellan halted, sending out the two 
ships — one of which deserted him — to explore the 
southeastward channel. Looking up it one can see 
in clear weather, some forty miles away, the peak of 
Sarmiento, highest of all the mountains of this re- 
gion, a double pyramid of rock peaks rising out of 
snow. It is of old crystalline rock and is described as 
by far the most striking object in all the Magellanic 
landscapes. Thick clouds hid it from our longing eyes. 
Its height is estimated at six thousand feet, and so 
far as I know it has never been ascended. That daunt- 
less climber, Sir Martin Conway, who got nearer to 
its top than any one else has ever done, was turned 
back by a frightful tempest below the last rock peak. 
East of Cape Froward, one is at once in a different 
region with a different climate. The air is drier and 
clearer. The shores are lower, the wood, still mostly 
of the Antarctic beech, is thicker, with many dead 
white trunks which take fire easily. The hills recede 
from the sea, and grow smoother in outline, finally 
disposing themselves in low flat-topped ridges, six or 
eight miles behind the shore-line. A wide expanse of 
water, and of land almost as level as the water, stretches 
out to the eastern horizon, so that at first one fancies 
that this apparently shoreless sea is part of the Atlantic, 
which is in fact still nearly a hundred miles away. Signs 
of civilization appear in a lighthouse at San Isidro, 
and near it at a small harbour on the mainland to which 
a few whalers resort, boiling down into oil the produce 



300 SOUTH AMERICA 

of their catch. Presently the masts and funnels ot 
vessels lying off shore at anchor rise out of the sea, and 
we heave to and disembark at the little town of Punta 
Arenas on the Patagonian coast, which English-speaking 
men call Sandy Point. This is the southernmost town 
not only in Chile, but in the whole world, twenty 
degrees further from the South Pole than Hammerfest, 
an older and larger place, is from the North Pole. 
It consists of about six very wide streets, only par- 
tially built up, running parallel to the shore, which 
are crossed at right angles by as many other similar 
streets, running up the hill, the houses low, many of 
them built, and nearly all of them roofed, with corru- 
gated iron. It has, therefore, no beauty at all except 
what is given by its wide view of the open sea basin 
of the Strait, here twenty miles wide, and beyond over 
the plains of Tierra del Fuego, the great island which lies 
opposite. In the far distance mountains can in clear 
weather be seen in the south of that island, Mount 
Sarmiento conspicuous among them. 

Punta Arenas was for many years only a place of 
call for whalers, since hardly any trading vessels passed 
through the Straits before the days of steam, and there- 
after for a while a Chilean penal settlement. It grew 
by degrees and has profited by the discovery of lignite 
coal in its neighbourhood, though the seam is small and 
of poor quality ; and within the last twenty years it has 
increased and thriven because sheep farming has been 
started on an extensive scale on the mainland of Pata- 
gonia as well as in Tierra del Fuego and some of the 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 301 

adjoining islands. All the sheep ranchmen within a 
range exceeding several days' journey come here for 
their supplies and all ship their wool from here, so it 
can now boast to be the leading commercial centre of 
the region, having no rival within a thousand miles. 
Whether it can develop much further may be doubtful, 
for traffic through the Straits will not greatly increase 
against the competition of the Trans-Andine railway 
for passengers and that of the Panama Canal for goods, 
and most of the land fit for sheep farming has been al- 
ready taken up. Neither the whale fishery nor sealing 
is now prosecuted on a large scale. 

The town is a cosmopolitan place, in which English, 
as well as Spanish and to a less extent German (for the 
steamers of a well-appointed German fine call frequently), 
is spoken ; people engaged in the sheep trade come and 
go from the Falkland Islands, and the ocean liners 
keep it in touch with the distant world of Valparaiso 
and Buenos Aires and Europe. It is the same dis- 
tance to the south of the Equator as the Straits of 
Belleisle in Labrador is to the north, but the climate here 
is far more equable. It is never warm, but the winters 
are not severe, there is little snow, and frosts are mod- 
erated by the adjoining sea. The air is dry and healthy 
with a rainfall of only ten inches in the year. Though 
the landscape is bare, for trees can with difficulty be 
induced to grow, and though there is much wind and 
no shelter, still we found something attractive in this 
remote and singular spot, for one has a constantly 
stimulative sense of the vast expanse of sky and sea 



302 SOUTH AMERICA 

and the distant plain of Tierra del Fuego, with a 
touch of mystery in the still more distant ranges of 
that island which just shew their snowy peaks on the 
horizon. The light over sea and shore has an exqui- 
site pearly clearness which reminds one of the similar 
light that floats over the lagoons between Venice and 
Aquileia. Can this peculiar quality in the atmosphere 
be due, here as there, to the presence of a large body 
of comparatively smooth and shallow water, mirroring 
back to heaven the light that it receives ? 

Tierra del Fuego, which one had been wont to think 
of as a land of dense forests and wild mountains, is, as 
seen from Punta Arenas, and all along the eastern part 
of the Straits from this point to the Atlantic, a fea- 
tureless level. Its northern part is flat, like the Pat- 
agonian mainland, which is itself the southernmost 
part of the great Argentine plain. Some parts are 
arid, but most of it is well grassed, excellent for sheep. 
Only in the far south are there mountains, the eastern 
prolongation of the range that runs (interrupted by 
channels between the isles) southeast from Cape Pilar. 
Neither along the shores of the Strait nor in those south- 
ern mountains are there any signs of volcanic action, 
but I was told that such evidences do exist at the ex- 
treme eastern end of the island, and there are in the 
Patagonian mainland, a little way north of the Straits, 
a large crater and a lava stream eighteen miles in 
length, the last manifestations to the south of those 
volcanic forces which are visible along the whole line 
of the Andes northward to Panama. Both in Tierra 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 303 

del Fuego and on the mainland there are left a few 
Patagonian aborigines. Those who dwell in the island 
are of the Ona tribe, tall men who, like the Tehuelches 
that roam over the mainland, answer to the descrip- 
tion of the Patagonian giants given by the early Span- 
ish and English navigators. Pigafetta relates that 
when Magellan's men had, near Port St. Julian, where 
he wintered, guilefully entrapped and fettered one 
of these giants, he cried out on Setebos to aid him, 
"that is," says Pigafetta, "the big devil" {il gran 
demonio). Shakespeare would seem to have taken 
from this account, through Eden's Decades of the 
New World, the Setebos whom Caliban names as "his 
dam's god" in the Tempest. 1 The Onas who used to 
come down to Punta Arenas to sell guanaco skins and 
obtain ardent spirits, are now seldom seen. Strong 
liquor was too much for them, as it was for Caliban, 
and has reduced their numbers. It is curious that the 
far more abject Fuegians, who love tobacco, detest 

x He is called Settaboth in the record of Sir Francis Drake's 
voyage (The World Encompassed, p. 487, Hakluyt Society Edition). 
(I take this reference from Robertson's edition of Pigafetta.) 
"Sycorax my dam," "the foul witch Sycorax," does not appear in 
Pigafetta, and comes from somewhere else : the name sounds Greek. 
As to Caliban and the Patagonians, see the notes to Dr. H. H. 
Furness's monumental edition of the Tempest, p. 379. Every one 
remembers Robert Browning's Caliban upon Setebos, or Natural 
Theology in the Island. The Settaboth mentioned in Drake's voyage 
is probably a mere repetition from Eden, for the Indians to whom 
Fletcher (in narrating that voyage) refers were encountered on the 
Chilean coast in lat. 38° S., a different set of people altogether. 
Fletcher's account is in many points hardly credible. See Barrow's 
Life of Sir Francis Drake, p. 121. 



304 SOUTH AMERICA 

intoxicating liquors. But the chief calamity that 
befell this interesting tribe was the discovery that the 
more level parts of Tierra del Fuego are fit for sheep. 
The ranchmen drove off the Onas : the Onas retaliated 
by stealing the sheep and when they got a chance, shoot- 
ing the ranchmen with arrows, for they have scarcely 
any firearms. The ranchmen then took to shooting 
the Onas at sight, so that now, out of three thousand 
who used to inhabit Tierra del Fuego, there are said 
to remain only three hundred, defending themselves 
in the recesses of the wooded mountains in the ex- 
treme south of the island. They are manly fellows 
of great strength and courage, and go about clothed 
only with a guanaco skin. Few guanacos are now left, 
for they also have had to make way for the sheep. 1 

After midnight the steamer left Punta Arenas for 
the Atlantic. Rising at daybreak I saw the eastern 
half of the Straits, than which nothing could be less like 
the western half. After traversing for some distance 
the wide basin between the mainland and Tierra del 
Fuego, on the west shore of which Punta Arenas stands, 
we reached the part of the Strait called the Second 
Narrows, where the passage, between low bluffs of hard 
earth on each side, is only a few miles wide, and then 
emerged from this into another large basin. Twenty 
miles further come the First Narrows, narrower than 

] The guanaco is the only large wild quadruped of these regions. He 
belongs to the same genus (Auchenia) as the llama, alpaca, and 
vicuna, but is bigger than any of them. Pigafetta describes him as 
having " the head of a mule, the body of a camel, the feet of a stag, 
and the tail of a horse." 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 305 

the Second, and then a wide bay, which in its turn opens 
into the Atlantic between two low capes, that on the 
north being Virgenes, and that on the south Espiritu 
Santo. Here it was that Magellan anchored while 
his two small ships went ahead to explore. The space 
between the capes, which is the eastern mouth of the 
Straits, is about ten miles wide. The coast here, as 
well as both shores of the Straits all the way from Punta 
Arenas, is perfectly flat, with a very slight rise of 
ground some miles back on the Patagonian side. Clear 
as was the air, no hills were visible in the distance, 
neither those in the south of Tierra del Fuego nor those 
westwards behind Cape Froward, where the Andes 
end. Over all this vast plain not a dwelling or sign of 
life could be discerned save the lighthouse on Cape 
Virgenes, where the boundary line between Chile and 
Argentina strikes the sea. The northeastern part of 
Tierra del Fuego belongs to the latter, the southwestern 
part to Chile. From below the cape, a low point runs 
out into the sea, to which British mariners have given the 
familiar name of Dungeness from its similarity to that 
curious shingle bank which the tides of the English 
Channel have piled up on the coast of Kent. It is, 
however, much shorter than our Dungeness and the 
pebbles of the shingle are smaller. 

Before I close this account of the Straits, a few remarks 
may be added on their general physical character, which 
some of my readers may have pictured to themselves as 
very different from what one finds them to be. I had 
myself done this, fancying them to be a channel long and 



306 SOUTH AMERICA 

narrow all the way from ocean to ocean, a channel be- 
tween steep, dark hills, covered with dense forests, with 
volcanoes, more or less extinct, rising behind. Nothing 
could be further from the reality. 

Magellan's Straits are unlike any other straits in 
this respect, that the physical aspect of the two ends is 
entirely different. The character of the shores on each 
side is the same in each part of the channel, but both 
shores of the eastern half, from the Atlantic to Cape 
Froward, are unlike those of the western half from 
Cape Froward to the Pacific. The former has low banks, 
with smooth outlines, slopes of earth or sand dipping 
into shallow water, and a climate extremely dry. The 
latter half is enclosed between high, steep mountains 
which are drenched by incessant rains. The eastern half 
is a channel, narrow at two points only, leading through 
the southernmost part of the vast Argentine plain, which 
has apparently been raised from the sea bottom in com- 
paratively recent times. The western half is a deep 
narrow cut through the extremity of a great mountain 
system that stretches north for thousands of miles, 
forming the western edge of South America, and the 
rocks on each side of it are ancient (palaeozoic or 
earlier). The western half is grand and solemn, with its 
deep waters mirroring white crags and blue glaciers. 
The low eastern half has no beauty save that which 
belongs to vast open spaces of level land and smooth 
water over which broods the silence of a clear and 
lucent air. A more singular contrast, all within a few 
hours' steaming, it would be hard to find. Unlike, 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 307 

however, as these two halves of the Straits are, they 
are both impressive in the sense they give of remote- 
ness and mystery, a passage between two oceans 
through a wilderness most of which is likely to be for- 
ever left to those overwhelming forces of nature, rain 
and wind and cold, which make it useless to man. 

Magellan's discovery of the Straits and circumnavi- 
gation of the globe was an event of the highest geographi- 
cal significance, for it finally proved not only that the 
earth was round, and that the western sea route to 
India, of which Columbus dreamed, really existed, but 
also that the earth was immensely larger than had been 
supposed. A few years after Magellan, Pizarro and his 
companions, sailing southward from Panama to north- 
ern Chile, proved that the "South Sea" discovered by 
Balboa stretched so far to the south that it must be 
continuous with that which Magellan had crossed to 
the Philippines. Thereafter, not much was done in 
the Southern Hemisphere until the discovery of New 
Zealand and Australia two centuries later. But no great 
importance, either commercial or political, belonged to a 
long and narrow strait which it was extremely difficult to 
navigate against the prevalent west winds, so when it 
was presently discovered that there was an open sea not 
much farther south, it was round Cape Horn and not 
through the Straits that most of the English and Dutch 
adventurers made their way to plunder the Spaniards 
on the Pacific coast ; and when the trade restrictions 
Spain had imposed finally disappeared at the end of the 
eighteenth century, commerce also went round Cape 



308 SOUTH AMERICA 

Horn, tedious and dangerous as was the passage to those 
who had to face the prevailing westerly gales. Even 
in the days when Charles Darwin sailed in the Beagle 
under Captain Fitzroy, hardly any merchant vessels 
traversed the Straits. It was the application of steam 
to ocean-going vessels that gave to this route the 
importance it has since possessed. 1 It is now threatened, 
as respects passenger traffic, with the competition of the 
Transandine railway; as respects goods traffic, with that 
of the Panama Canal, and it may possibly retain only so 
much of the latter as passes between Pacific ports south 
of Callao and Atlantic ports south of the Equator. 

The morning was brilliant with blue wavelets spar- 
kling under a light breeze as we passed out to the east 
and saw the low, flat bluff of Cape Virgenes sink below 
the horizon. But the wind rose steadily, and next morn- 
ing the spray was dashing over the vessel when we 
caught sight, through drifting clouds, of the shores of 
the Falkland Isles. They were wild and dreary shores 
bordered by rocky islands and scattered reefs, no 
dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on 
sea. In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing 
it, the mouth of the channel which separates the East 
from the West Falkland, we anchored in the deep 
bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, 
the chief harbour and village of the islands. The wind 
was still so strong that our careful captain decided not 
to take his vessel through the very narrow passage which 

1 The steamers of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company began 
to run through the Straits about 1840. 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 309 

leads to the inner harbour, so we got into the tiny 
launch which had come out with the mails, and after a 
tumble in the waves and a run through the narrows 
found ourselves in a landlocked inlet, on the shore of 
which stands the capital city of this remote and lonely 
part of the British Empire, a place of a few hundred 
inhabitants. Here was Government House, a sub- 
stantial villa of grey stone. Indoors we found a cheerful 
little drawing-room with a cheerful blaze in the grate, a 
welcome sight to those who had not seen a fire during 
three weeks of almost constant cold. There was a tree 
beside the house, the only tree in the islands, and a con- 
servatory full of gay flowers, looking all the prettier in 
such a spot. And from the top of its tall staff the meteor 
flag of England was streaming straight out in the gale. 
The village — it seems to be the only village in the 
colony — consists of one street built mostly of wood 
and corrugated iron, with a few better houses of stone 
whitewashed, and reminded us faintly of the little seaside 
hamlets of Shetland or the Hebrides, though here there 
was neither a fishlike smell nor any signs of the industry 
which dominates those islands. All was plain and hum- 
ble, but decent, and not without a suggestion of internal 
comfort. The only colour was given by some splendid 
bushes of yellow gorse in full flower, an evidence that 
though it is never warm here, the thermometer never 
falls very low. The climate is extremely healthy, but 
the winds are so strong and incessant that everybody 
goes about stooping forward. 

The isles were uninhabited when discovered, a fact 



310 SOUTH AMERICA 

creditable to the aborigines of South America, for a more 
unpromising spot for a settlement of savages could not 
be imagined ; no wood and no food either on the land 
or on the sea. At present there are about two thousand 
three hundred inhabitants, nearly all of British origin, 
including a good many Scots brought hither as shep- 
herds, for the colony is now one enormous sheep-farm, 
probably the biggest in the world, and lives off the wool 
and skins it sends home and the living sheep it exports 
for breeding purposes to Punta Arenas. Wild cattle, 
descendants of a few brought long ago by the earlier 
settlers, were once numerous, but have now almost dis- 
appeared; and the tall tussock grass, which was such a 
feature in the days of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Ex- 
pedition (1840), has vanished, except from some of the 
smaller isles. Poor is the prospect for an agriculturist, 
for the climate permits nothing to ripen except potatoes 
and turnips with a few gooseberries and currants. As 
in most oceanic islands, the native land fauna, especially 
of mammals, is extremely scanty, and, what is stranger, 
there are, so one is told, so few fish in the sea that it 
is not worth while to face the storms to catch them. 
Perhaps this is an exaggeration, meant to justify the 
laziness as timidity of those who won't go out. Cer- 
tain it is that the sea is always rough, and there are no 
fishing boats about. Neither are there roads; the pop- 
ulation is so thin that they would cost more than its 
needs justify, and locomotion, even on horseback, is hin- 
dered by the bogs and swamps that fill the hollows. 
One naturally asks in the spirit which fills us all to-day, 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 311 

whether anything can be done to "develop the place," 
i.e. to find some resources for the people and help them 
to make something more of the islands. Well, there are 
the seals which frequent the coast. They belong to a 
species different from that of the North Pacific, but 
with an equally valuable fur. Some are now taken 
by the few whaling vessels which still resort to these 
tempestuous seas, but nothing is done to prevent their 
destruction within territorial waters or to preserve a 
land herd, and it would no doubt be difficult to exer- 
cise effective control on such a wild and thinly peopled 
coast. Yet what one heard on the spot seemed to 
suggest that steps might be taken by international agree- 
ment for the protection and utilization of these and other 
large marine mammals both here and in the other islands 
in this part of the ocean. Some of the rarer species are 
threatened with extinction. 1 The arrangements recently 
made by a treaty between Great Britain, the United 
States, Russia, and Japan, for the benefit of the North 
Pacific sealing industry constitute a useful precedent. 

There are ports enough to furnish all the west coast 
of South America with harbours of refuge, but no use 
for them, for few ships come this way, and, as has been 
said, nobody goes fishing. Yet far out of the world's 
highways as they lie, and slight as is their economic or 
political value, the Falkland Isles have had a long and 
chequered history. An English navigator, Davis, dis- 

1 The enormous herds of fur seals which existed a century ago in 
the islands of South Georgia, the South Orkneys, and the South 
Shetlands have vanished. 300,000 are said to have been killed 
within five years in the South Shetlands alone. 



312 SOUTH AMERICA 

covered them in a.d. 1592, and they were afterwards 
explored by a French voyager from the port of St. Malo, 
whence the name of lies Malouines, by which the French 
still call them. In 1764 Bougainville, one of those 
famous seamen who adorned the annals of France in 
that century, and whose name is now preserved from 
oblivion by the pretty, mauve-coloured flower which 
grows over all the bungalows and railway stations of 
India, planted a little colony here, with the view, fan- 
tastic as it seems to us now, of making this remote 
corner of the earth a central point from which to estab- 
lish a transoceanic dominion of France in the Southern 
Hemisphere to replace that which had been lost at Que- 
bec in 1759. The Spaniards, desiring no neighbours in 
that hemisphere, dispossessed these settlers. An Eng- 
lish colony planted shortly afterwards, presently driven 
out by the Spaniards, and then re-established, was with- 
drawn in 1774. Finally, in 1832, the British government 
resumed possession of the islands, then practically unin- 
habited, for the sake of the whale fishery, and in 1843 a 
government was organized . In its present form, it is of the 
type usual in small British colonies, viz. a governor with 
an executive and a legislative council, the two bodies nom- 
inated, and consisting almost entirely of the same persons. 
These political vicissitudes have left no abiding mark, 
except in a few remains at the station of Port Louis 
which the French made their capital, for there never 
was any population to speak of till sheep-farming began. 
The Pacific liners call once a month on their outward 
and inland voyages, and steamers go now and then to 
Punta Arenas, but there are no British possessions nearer 



THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN 313 

than Cape Colony to the northeast and Pitcairn Island 
to the northwest, thousands of miles away. 

We walked with the Acting Governor to the top of a 
hill behind Port Stanley to get some impressions of 
nature. There were as yet only two or three flowers in 
bloom, and what chiefly struck us was the resemblance 
of the thick, low mats and cushions of the plants to 
some species that grow on the upper parts of the Scot- 
tish Highland mountains. Among these, there was one 
producing a sweet berry, the dillydilly, from which ex- 
cellent jam is made, the only edible wild product of the 
country. The prevailing strata are quartzose schists 
and sandstones, which rise in two mountains to heights 
exceeding two thousand three hundred feet, and as 
there is no trace of volcanic action anywhere, the islands 
are evidently not a link between the great Antarctic 
volcanoes and those of the Andean system, but perhaps 
a detached part of the older rocks through which those 
volcanoes have risen. 

From the hilltop we looked over a wide stretch of 
rolling hills covered with short grass, which in the wet 
hollows was yellowish or brown. Ridges or peaklets 
of bare white or blue rock rose here and there into 
miniature mountains, and there were runs of loose 
stones on the slopes below the ridges, — altogether 
a wild landscape, with no woods, no fields, no signs of 
human life except in the village beneath, yet redeemed 
from dreariness by the emerald brilliance of the air 
and the variety of lights and shadows falling on the 
far-off slopes. The evening tints were mirrored in the 
landlocked inlet below, and beyond the outer bay the 



314 SOUTH AMERICA 

cold, grey, ever-troubled sea stretched away towards 
the South Pole. We felt as if quite near the South 
Pole, yet were no nearer to it than the North Pole is to 
Liverpool. One seemed to have reached the very end 
of the world. Though one might be reminded a 
little of the Hebrides, — all windswept islands have 
points of resemblance, — still the scenery was not 
really like any part of our Northern Hemisphere, but 
had a character of its own. I have seen many wild 
islands in many stormy seas, and some of them more 
bare and forbidding than this, but never any inhabited 
spot that seemed so entirely desolate and solitary and 
featureless. There was nothing for the eye to dwell 
upon, no lake, no river, no mountain, — only scattered 
and shapeless hills, — a land without form or expression, 
yet with a certain simple and primitive beauty in the 
colours of the yellow grass and grey-blue rocks, shining 
through clear air, with the sea-wind singing over them. 
No spot could better have met the wishes of the hermits 
who, in early Christian centuries, planted themselves on 
rocky islets and lonely mountain tops on the coasts of 
Ireland, for here there is nothing, even in Nature her- 
self, to distract a pious soul from meditation. Any one 
who to-day desires seclusion to think out a new philos- 
ophy might find this a fitting place of peace, if only he 
could learn to endure the perpetual drive of the wind. 

The last flush of sunset was reddening on the inlet 
when we re-joined our steamer and sailed down past the 
lighthouse out into the ocean, a fresh flock of sea-birds 
appearing to bear us company. Three more stormy 
days and stormy nights northward to Montevideo! 



CHAPTER IX 



ARGENTINA 



The interest which Argentina arouses is entirely un- 
like that which appeals to the traveller's eye and mind 
in Peru or Bolivia or Chile. In each of these three 
countries there is scenery grand in scale and different in 
type from what any other part of the world has to shew. 
In Peru and Bolivia there are also the remains of a 
primitive civilization, scanty, no doubt, but all the more 
attractive because they stimulate rather than satisfy 
our curiosity. They speak of antiquity, and indeed all 
three countries have a flavour of antiquity, though Chile 
has scarcely any relics coming down from it. But in the 
River Plate regions there is (except along the Andes and 
in the far north) little natural beauty, and nothing that 
recalls the past. All is modern and new ; all belongs to 
the prosperous present and betokens a still more pros- 
perous future. Argentina is like western North Amer- 
ica. The swift and steady increase in its agricultural 
production, with an increase correspondingly large in 
means of internal transportation, is what gives its im- 
portance to the country and shews that it will have a 
great part to play in the world. It is the United States 
of the Southern Hemisphere. 

Not even the approach by sea to Alexandria or to 
the mouth of the Hooghly below Calcutta, is duller than 

315 



316 SOUTH AMERICA 

that to Buenos Aires. Before land is seen, the vessel 
enters a muddy, reddish brown sea, and presently 
the winding channel, marked for a long way by buoys, 
shews how shallow is the water on either side. This 
is the estuary, two hundred miles long and at this point 
about thirty miles broad, of the Rio de la Plata, 
formed by the union of the great river Uruguay with 
the still greater Parand, streams which between them 
drain nearly one-fourth part of the South American 
continent. Approaching the Argentine shore, one sees 
a few masts and many funnels rising above the tall 
hulls of steamships, docked in lines alongside huge 
wharves. Beyond the open space of the wharf runs a 
row of offices and warehouses, but nothing else is seen, 
nor can one tell, except from the size of the docks and 
the crowd of vessels, that a great city lies behind. Noth- 
ing can be seen, because Buenos Aires stands only some 
thirty feet above high-water mark in a perfectly flat 
alluvial plain, with scarcely any rise in the ground for 
hundreds of miles, and not a rock anywhere. On enter- 
ing the city one is surprised to find that with a bound- 
less prairie all around, the streets should be so narrow 
that in most of them wheeled traffic is allowed to move 
only one way. One great thoroughfare, the Avenida 
de Mayo, traverses the centre of the city from the 
large plaza in which the government buildings stand 
to the still larger and very handsome plaza which is 
adorned by the palace of the legislature. Fortunately it 
is wide, and being well planted with trees is altogether a 
noble street, statelier than Piccadilly in London^ or Unter 



ARGENTINA 317 

den Linden in Berlin, or Pennsylvania Avenue in Wash- 
ington. In the newer parts of the city more width is now 
being given to streets as they are from time to time laid 
out, but the congestion of the nucleus is a serious obsta- 
cle to rapid locomotion, which is otherwise well provided 
for by numerous electric car lines. No North American 
city has a better car service. Though skyscrapers have 
scarcely yet made their appearance, the houses are 
much higher than in the west coast cities, because 
earthquakes are not feared; and many mansions in 
the residential quarters, built in the modern French 
style, have architectural merit. So, too, the numerous 
small plazas, usually planted with trees or shrubs and 
furnished with seats, partly atone for the want of space 
in the streets. It must be added that the statues 
which adorn these plazas do not tempt the passer-by to 
linger in aesthetic enjoyment. One is too acutely 
reminded of the bronze equestrian warriors so numer- 
ous in Washington. The cities of the western world, 
having a short history, seem to run to the commemora- 
tion of heroes whose names, little known to other na- 
tions, will soon be forgotten in their own, whereas the 
old countries, except Italy, seem forgetful of those 
whom the western stranger would like to have seen 
held up to reverence. 

Buenos Aires deserves its name, for its air is clear 
as well as keen, there being no large manufacturing 
works to pollute it with coal smoke. The streets are 
well kept ; everything is fresh and bright. The most 
striking buildings besides those of the new Legislative 



318 SOUTH AMERICA 

Chambers, with their tall and handsome dome, are the 
Opera-house, the interior of which equals any in Europe, 
and the Jockey Club, whose scale and elaborate ap- 
pointments surpass even the club-houses of New York. 
Buenos Aires is something between Paris and New 
York. It has the business rush and the luxury of the 
one, the gaiety and pleasure-loving aspect of the other. 
Everybody seems to have money, and to like spending 
it, and to like letting everybody else know that it is 
being spent. Betting on horses is the favourite amuse- 
ment, and the races the greatest occasion for social 
display. An immense concourse gathers at the 
racing enclosure and fills the grand-stand. The high- 
est officials of state and city are there, as well as the 
world of wealth and fashion. The ladies are decked 
out with all the Parisian finery and jewels that money 
can buy; and although nature has given to many of 
them good features and to most of them fine eyes, custom 
seems to prescribe that nature shall not be left to her- 
self. On fine afternoons, there is a wonderful turnout 
of carriages drawn by handsome horses, and still more 
of costly motor cars, in the principal avenues of the 
Park ; they press so thick that vehicles are often jammed 
together for fifteen or twenty minutes, unable to move 
on. Nowhere in the world does one get a stronger 
impression of exuberant wealth and extravagance. 
The Park itself, called Palermo, lies on the edge o f the 
city towards the river, and is approached by a well- 
designed and well-planted avenue. It suffers from the 
absolute flatness of the ground in which there is no 



ARGENTINA 319 

point high enough to give a good view over the estuary, 
and also from the newness of the trees, for all this region 
was till lately a bare pampa. But what with its great 
extent and the money and skill that are being expended 
on it, this park will in thirty years be a glory to the 
city. The Botanical Garden, though all too small, is 
extremely well arranged and of the highest interest to 
a naturalist, who finds in it an excellent collection of 
South American trees and shrubs. 

As the Opera-house and the races and the Park 
shew one side of the activities of this sanguine com- 
munity, so the docks and port shew another. Twenty 
years ago sea-going vessels had to lie two or three miles 
off Buenos Aires, discharging their cargo by lighters 
and their passengers partly by small launches and 
partly by high-wheeled carts which carried people from 
the launches ashore through the shallow water. Now 
a long, deep channel has been dug, and is kept open 
by dredging, up which large steamers find their way to 
the very edge of the city. Docks many miles in length 
have been constructed to receive the shipping, and 
large stretches of land reclaimed, and huge warehouses 
erected and railway fines laid down alongside the 
wharves. Not Glasgow when she deepened her 
river to admit the largest ships, nor Manchester 
when she made her ship canal, hardly even Chicago 
when she planned a new park and lagoons in the lake 
that washes her front, shewed greater enterprise and 
bolder conceptions than did the men of Buenos Aires 
when on this exposed and shallow coast they made 



320 SOUTH AMERICA 

alongside their city a great ocean harbour. They are 
a type of our time, in their equal devotion to business 
and pleasure, the two and only deities of this latest 
phase of humanity. 

If the best parts of Buenos Aires are as tasteful as 
those of Paris, there is plenty of ugliness in the worst 
suburbs. On its land side, the city dies out into a 
waste of scattered shanties, or " shacks " (as they 
are called in the United States), dirty and squalid, 
with corrugated iron roofs, their wooden boards 
gaping like rents in tattered clothes. These are in- 
habited by the newest and poorest of the immigrants 
from southern Italy and southern Spain, a large and 
not very desirable element among whom anarchism is 
rife. This district which, if it can hardly be called city, 
can still less be called country, stretches far out over the 
Pampa. Thus, although the central' parts are built 
closely, these suburbs are built so sparsely that the town 
as a whole covers an immense space of ground. Further 
out and after passing for some miles between market 
gardens and fields divided by wire fences, with never a 
hedge, one reaches real country, an outer zone in which 
some of the wealthy landowners have laid out their 
estates and erected pleasant country houses. We were 
invited to one such, and admired the art with which 
the ground had been planted, various kinds of trees 
having been selected with so much taste that even on 
this unpromising level picturesqueness and beauty had 
been attained. Everything that does not need much 
moisture grows luxuriantly. We saw rosebushes forty 



ARGENTINA 321 

feet high, pouring down a cataract of blossoms. The 
hospitable owner had spent, as rich estancieros often 
do, large sums upon his live stock, purchasing in Great 
Britain valuable pedigree bulls and cows, and by cross- 
ing the best European breeds with the Argentine stock 
(originally Spanish) had succeeded in getting together 
a herd comparable to the best in England. To have 
first-rate animals is here a matter of pride, even more 
than a matter of business. It is the only interest that 
competes with' horse-racing. Our friend had a num- 
ber of Gauchos as stockmen, and they shewed us feats 
of riding and lassoing which recalled the old days of the 
open Pampas, before high stock-breeding was dreamt 
of, when the Gaucho horsemen disputed the control of 
these regions with the now vanished Indian. 

Though Buenos Aires is often described as a cosmopoli- 
tan place, its population has far fewer elements than would 
be found in any of the great cities of the United States. 
There are English and German colonies, both composed 
almost wholly of business and railway men, and each 
keeping, for social purposes, pretty closely to itself. 
There is a French colony, its upper section including 
men of intellectual mark, while the humbler members 
serve pleasure rather than business. From the United 
States not many persons have come to settle as mer- 
chants or ranch owners, but the great meat companies 
are already at work. Of the so-called "Latin" element 
in the inhabitants, half or a little more is Argentine 
born, less than a quarter Spanish or Basque, more than 
a quarter Italian, largely from Sicily and Calabria. 



322 SOUTH AMERICA 

Those Slavonic parts of central and eastern Europe 
which have recently flooded the United States with 
immigrants have sent very few to South America. 
Thus the mass of the population in Buenos Aires is 
entirely Spanish or Italian in speech, and the two lan- 
guages are so similar that the Italians easily learn Spanish 
while also modifying it by their own words and idioms. 
A mixed, not to say corrupt, Spanish is the result. 
That there should be an endless diversity of types of 
face is not surprising, when one remembers how great 
are the diversities as well in Spain as in Italy among 
the natives of the various provinces in both those 
kingdoms. 

The growth of a few great cities at a rate more 
rapid than that of the countries to which they be- 
long is one of the most remarkable facts of recent 
years and fraught with many consequences. It is 
especially visible in the newest countries. In New 
South Wales the population of Sydney is nearly two- 
fifths that of the whole state, in Victoria that of Mel- 
bourne more than two-fifths. In California two great 
cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have one-third 
of the whole population. 1 The same tendency is ap- 
parently in South America. Of the whole population of 
Argentina, with its immense area of 1,135,000 square 
miles, one-fifth dwell in the city of Buenos Aires. 2 It is 
probable that this ratio may be maintained so that when, 

1 1 reckon Oakland and Berkeley as, for this purpose, parts of San 
Francisco. 

2 The population of the Republic is about 7,000,000, and that of 
Buenos Aires 1,300,000. 



ARGENTINA 323 

thirty years hence, Argentina counts twenty millions of 
inhabitants, Buenos Aires will count four millions. There 
are other large cities, and one of them, Cordova, has an 
ancient university and a society of cultivated men. But 
business life and political life, as well as literary and 
intellectual life, are so concentrated in Buenos Aires as 
to make it to dwarf all the other cities and give to it an 
influence comparable to that of Paris in France. The 
history of the republic was for many years a history of 
the struggles between the capital — already pre-eminent 
in revolutionary days — and the provinces. So the 
people of Buenos Aires divide the Argentine nation 
into two classes, themselves, who are called the 
Portenos (men of the Port), and all the rest, the 
dwellers in the Campo or open country. 1 And 
though the wonderful development of the railway 
system has accelerated the settlement of the interior 
and brought the comforts of civilization to its towns, 
Buenos Aires has continued to maintain its supremacy 
by constantly drawing people from the interior. It 
is, moreover, the gateway through which all must pass 
to and from Europe. Thus the Porteno is the type 
and flower of Argentina, — the type of its character, the 
flower of its civilization. When we try to understand 
and appraise the Argentine nation, which for Argentina 
is the most interesting and indeed (apart from statistics 
of production) the only subject of study, it is on him 

ir The English, adopting this term, talk of the rural parts of 
Argentina as " the Camp," an expression which at first puzzles the 
visitor. 



324 SOUTH AMERICA 

that the eye must be fixed. Nevertheless he is far 
from being the only factor. The nation is spread over 
a vast space. To conjecture its future we must think 
of the physical and economic conditions under which 
it will develop. These, therefore, I will try to sketch 
briefly, admitting that my own personal knowledge is 
confined to Buenos Aires and its neighbourhood, and to 
the region round Mendoza, mentioned in Chapter VII. 
I shall speak first of the natural features of the country, 
and then of the natives and of the colonists who came 
among them, before describing the Argentina of our own 
time. 

The northwestern part of the republic, lying east of 
northern Chile and south of western Bolivia, is a table- 
land, sometimes rugged, sometimes undulating, the 
higher parts of it much like the adjoining plateau of 
Bolivia. But the rest of the country, nine-tenths of the 
whole, is an immense plain more than two thousand miles 
long from Magellan's Straits to the frontiers of eastern 
Bolivia and Paraguay. It is interrupted in a few points 
by low ranges, but, speaking generally, is a prairie like 
that which in North America lies between the hills of 
southern Oklahoma and the Canadian border, though 
more level, for it wants the undulating swells and 
ridges of Kansas and Iowa, and is less seamed by river 
beds. The climate varies with the latitude. It is 
severe in the Patagonian south, and almost tropical in 
the north. But in the region called the Pampas, that 
is to say, a sort of square, six hundred miles wide 
from the estuary of the Rio de la Plata to the outlying 



ARGENTINA 325 

foothills of the Andes and about as long from north to 
south, it resembles that of west central Europe, for the 
heat is great only during the middle of summer and the 
winter cold is moderate. Except in the far north, which 
has a wet summer season with a heavy precipita- 
tion, the rainfall is scanty and diminishes as one 
goes from east to west, so that much of the western 
belt, lying under the Andes, is too dry to be culti- 
vated except by irrigation. Fortunately, the streams 
that descend from the snows provide irrigation along 
their banks. Many of them lose themselves in the arid 
ground on their course further eastward, but as this 
ground has a slight uniform fall towards the east, 
they supply a certain amount of subterranean moisture, 
so that in many districts where there are no superficial 
streams, water can be had by digging. 

All this level Pampa, except that subtropical northern 
section I have referred to, is bare and open prairie, 
covered, as were the former prairies of North America, 
with grass and flowers, the grass sometimes six or seven 
feet high; but with no trees save here and there along the 
beds of the few and feeble streams. The native fauna, 
especially in the families to which the larger mammals 
belong, was poorer than that of western North America 
and far scantier than that of the southern parts of 
Africa in the same latitude. There were no buffaloes 
or elk, and few horned creatures corresponding to the 
elands and hartebeests and antelopes of South Africa. 
So remarkable a contrast is doubtless explicable by the 
different geological histories of the two continents. 



326 SOUTH AMERICA 

When the Spaniards arrived, this vast region was oc- 
cupied only by a few wandering Indian tribes, most of 
them low in the scale of civilization. They did not culti- 
vate the soil, they had no milk-giving animals, and indeed 
hardly any animals to feed upon except the guanaco 
and the small South American ostrich. As the chase 
furnished but little food to these nomads, their numbers 
did not increase. Only in the hilly regions of the north- 
west were there settled tribes which had learnt some of 
the arts of life from their Peruvian neighbours. The rest 
of the country was a vast open wilderness like the lands 
beyond the Missouri, but the tribes were fewer and less 
formidable than the Sioux or Pawnees or Comanches. 

For three centuries after their arrival the Spaniards 
did little to explore or settle the western or southern 
parts of the country. They founded small posts from 
Buenos Aires northwards along the Parana and Para- 
guay rivers, and through them kept up communication 
with Potosi and Lima across the vast Andean plateau. 
As the government forbade the Argentines to trade with 
Europe direct, Spanish merchandise had to be brought 
to them by a long and difficult land route via Panama 
and the ports of Peru, and thence over the Andes. The 
inconveniences of this monstrous system, devised in the 
interests of a group of Spanish traders, were mitigated 
by the smuggling into Buenos Aires, which was carried 
on by means of English and Dutch ships. Life was not 
secure, for the Indian tribes sometimes raided up to the 
gates of the little towns, such as Cordova and Tucuman, 
but as the savages had no firearms and no discipline, 



ARGENTINA 327 

it was generally easy to repulse them. Meanwhile 
some cattle and horses which had been turned loose 
in the Pampas after the middle of the sixteenth century 
began to multiply, till by the beginning of the eighteenth 
there were vast herds of both all over the plains, wher- 
ever grass grew, as far south as Patagonia. 

When the development of the country had received 
an impetus by the creation in 1776 of a viceroy alty 
at Buenos Aires, and by the permission given to the 
Atlantic ports to trade with Europe, the cattle and 
horses became a source of wealth, men took to ranching, 
and colonization spread out into the wilderness. Then, 
in 1810, came the revolution which freed Argentina from 
Spain, and gave her people the opportunity of making 
their own prosperity. Unfortunately a period of civil 
wars followed, and it was not till the fall of the dictator 
Rosas in 1852 that the era of real progress began. 

All this time the native Indians had been disappear- 
ing, partly by war, partly from the causes which usually 
break down aborigines in contact with white men. 
A campaign organized against them in 1879 practically 
blotted out the last of those who had roved over the cen- 
tral Pampas. The more civilized Indians of the north- 
western plateau are quiet and industrious. A few 
nomads, now quite harmless, survive in Patagonia, 
and some fiercer tribes maintain a virtual independence 
in the forest and swamp country of the Gran Chaco 
in the far north. Otherwise the aborigines have van- 
ished, leaving no trace, and having poured only a very 
slight infusion of native blood into the veins of 



328 SOUTH AMERICA 

the modern Argentine. Meanwhile the strife with the 
Indians and the long civil wars which followed inde- 
pendence, as well as the occupation first of catching 
wild cattle and horses and then of herding tame ones, 
had produced a type of frontiersman and cattle- 
man not unlike that of western North America between 
1800 and 1880 and more distantly resembling the 
Cossack of southern Russia a century and a half 
ago. This was the Gaucho, a word said to be drawn 
from one of the native languages, in which it means 
" stranger." He was above all things a horseman, 
never dismounting from his animal except to sleep 
beside it. His weapons against cattle and men were 
the lasso and the boletas, balls of metal (or stone) 
fastened together by a thong, and so hurled as to coil 
round the legs of the creature at which they were 
aimed. Such missiles were used in war by some of 
the Andean tribes. His dress was the poncho, a square 
piece of woollen cloth with a hole cut for the head to 
go through, and a pair of drawers. He could live on 
next to nothing and knew no fatigue. Round him 
clings all the romance of the Pampas, for he was taken 
as the embodiment of the primitive virtues of daring, 
endurance, and loyalty. Now he, too, is gone, as 
North American frontiersmen like Daniel Boone went 
eighty or ninety years ago, and as the cow-boy of 
Texas and Wyoming is now fast going. 

Such was the country and such those who dwelt in it : 
boundless plains, bare and featureless, but fertile 
wherever there was rain enough to water them, and not 



ARGENTINA 329 

too hot for the outdoor labour of a south European 
race, a land fit for cattle and for crops, easy to traverse, 
easy to till, because there were neither stones to be 
removed nor trees to be felled. Yet in 1852 only an in- 
significant fraction of it was used for tillage, and such 
wealth as there was consisted of the vast herds of cattle. 
The population had scarcely reached a million and a 
half. What is it now ? 

With the comparative peace that followed the fall of 
Rosas there came the new factors which have enabled 
the country to advance so quickly: the entrance of Eu- 
ropean capital, chiefly expended in providing means of 
transportation, and the arrival of immigrants from Italy 
and Spain. No country offers greater facilities for the 
construction of railways. Quickly and cheaply built over 
a surface everywhere smooth and level, they radiate 
out from the capital, and have now penetrated every 
part of the country except the marshy wilderness 
of the Gran Chaco in the north and the arid 
wilderness of remote Patagonia in the south. The 
central part of the republic within three hundred 
miles of Buenos Aires is as thickly scored with fines 
of steel as is Westphalia or Ohio. Settlers, mostly 
following the railroads, have now put under crops or 
laid out in well-appointed stock farms all this central 
region and a good deal more of land to the north of it. 
The rest of the plain is occupied by cattle ranches or 
sheep-farms, except where the want of water makes 
stock raising impossible. Out of the 253,000,000 
acres which are roughly estimated as being the area 



330 SOUTH AMERICA 

available for agricultural or pastural purposes in Ar- 
gentina — the total area of the country being 728,- 
000,000 acres — 47,000,000 were under cultivation in 
1910, this, of course, including the slopes of the Andes 
in the northwest round Tucuman and Jujuy, where 
sugar and other semi-tropical products are grown. 

An enormous area still remains available for tillage, 
though nothing but experiment can determine to what 
extent lands hitherto deemed too arid may be made pro- 
ductive by the new methods of dry farming, now pros- 
ecuted so successfully in western North America, and 
beginning to be tried in South Africa and Australia also. 
Of this central tract already brought under cultivation, 
by far the largest part is fertile. There are sandy bits 
here and there, but the bulk of it is a rich, deep loam, 
giving large returns in its natural state. Thus the wav- 
ing plains of grass over which the wandering Indian 
roamed and the Gaucho careered lassoing the wild cattle 
are now being rapidly turned into a settled farming 
country. 

The history of these regions and the process of 
their settlement resembles in many points that of 
the western United States and western Canada, but 
differs in one point of great significance. In North 
America the settlement of the new lands has from 
first to last been conducted by agricultural settlers 
drawn from the middle or working-class of the older 
parts of the country or of Europe, and the land has 
been allotted to them in small properties, seldom exceed- 
ing one hundred and sixty acres. Thus over all the 



ARGENTINA 331 

Mississippi Valley states and over the Canadian 
northwest there has grown up a population of small 
farmers, owning the land they till, and furnishing a 
solid basis for the establishment of democratic insti- 
tutions among intelligent and educated men who have 
an interest in order and good administration. In 
Argentina, however, — and the same is generally true 
of Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Brazil, — the land, be- 
fore or when it began to be regularly settled, passed in 
large blocks into comparatively few hands. There was 
no class like the men who settled New England in the 
seventeenth century and whose descendants settled the 
Great West in the nineteenth. The ideas of Spanish feu- 
dalism still lived among the Argentine colonists of a cen- 
tury ago. Leading men or rich men took as much land 
as they could get on the Pampas ; and, seeing that there 
was little competition, each could get pretty much all he 
wanted. Thus the country became and is a country 
of great estates. They are measured by the square 
league, which contains about six thousand acres. 
Though a tendency to subdivision has set in and will 
doubtless continue, estancias of sixty thousand acres 
are not uncommon; and the average holding is said 
to be even now about six square miles. 

This feature has, of course, had important effects 
on the character of the rural population. It consists, 
broadly speaking, of two classes, the rich estancieros 
or landholders, and the labourers. Though a good 
many Englishmen and other foreigners have bought 
farms and mean to stay on them, so that they or their 



332 SOUTH AMERICA 

children will doubtless end by becoming Argentines, 
still most of the large landholders are Argentine born. 
Many have become or are becoming opulent, not only by 
the sale of their crops and their live stock, but simply 
by the rapid rise in the value of land. They live in 
a liberal, easy, open-air way in straggling mansions of 
the bungalow type, low and large, which they are now, 
thanks to the railways, able to furnish with the mod- 
ern appliances of comfort. The labouring class, who 
gather like feudal dependents round the estancia, are of 
two classes. Some are native, largely the offspring of 
the old Gauchos, who have now settled down to work 
as peons (labourers), unlearning their wild ways, 
and beginning to send their children to school. The 
rest are immigrants drawn from Italy and Spain by 
the immense demand for labour. Most numerous are 
the natives of northern Italy, hard-working men who 
do not fear the heat and can live on very little. Many 
of them come out for the harvesting weeks of Decem- 
ber and January, and return home to reap their own 
harvest or gather their own vines in the Italian summer 
and autumn, thus making the best of both hemi- 
spheres, much as the sleepless herdsman in the Odyssey 
could earn wages by working day and night. As the 
native peons are the men qualified to handle live stock, 
so these Italians are the most valuable for all kinds of 
agriculture. Some receive wages: some who stay for 
a few years on the farm receive land to till and bring 
into condition, and pay a part, perhaps one-quarter, 
of the crop by way of rent. They seem to take to the 



ARGENTINA 333 

country, and though many return to Europe when they 
have accumulated what is to them a fortune, a large and 
increasing number remain. Probably more and more of 
them will try to acquire small holdings, and as the price 
of land rises, many great landowners may, since the habit 
of extravagance is always growing, be tempted to sell 
off bits of their estates. Thus a middle class of peas- 
ant proprietors may grow up between the big estan- 
ciero and the lowly peon. But at the present moment 
small properties are rare. The country is not, like 
western Canada, a place suitable for British or Scandi- 
navian immigrants of small means, not merely on 
account of the climate, but because they could not 
easily get small farms and the means of working them. 
At present it is only persons with some capital who can 
be advised to come hither from England to farm. 

Agricultural prosperity, more general here than 
almost anywhere else in the world, is tempered by 
two risks, either of which may destroy the profits 
of the year. One is drought. As the average rain- 
fall is, in most parts of the country, only just sufficient 
to give moisture to the arable land, together with 
drink and grass to the animals, a deficient rainfall 
means scanty crops and the loss of cattle. It is only 
along the skirts of the Andes that much can be done by 
irrigation, for the permanent rivers are few and the la- 
goons, which at one time were frequent, have been dry- 
ing up. Besides, they are often brackish. The other 
danger is a plague of locusts. These horrible creatures 
come in swarms so vast as to be practically irresistible. 



334 SOUTH AMERICA 

Expedients may be used to destroy them while they are 
walking along the ground by digging trenches in their 
path, tumbling them in and burning them, but many 
survive these efforts, and when they get on the wing, 
nothing can be done to check their devastating flight. 
Did the swarms come every year, the land would not 
be worth tilling, but at present the yield of good years 
more than covers the losses both of droughts and of 
locust invasions. Men talk of erecting a gigantic 
fence of zinc to stop the march of the creatures south- 
ward from the Gran Chaco, for here, as in South Africa, 
they seem to come out of a wilderness. When the Gran 
Chaco itself begins to be reclaimed, the plague may 
perhaps be stayed. 

As aridity is the weak point of the Pampas in their 
agricultural aspect, so monotony is the defect of their 
scenery. There is a certain beauty in a vast plain, but 
this one is so absolutely dead a level that you cannot 
see its vastness. There would be a charming variety 
of colour in it, the vivid green of the alfalfa and the 
light blue profusion of the flax blossoms contrasting 
with the yellowing wheat and the more sober greyish 
tints of the maize and the bleached pasture, but all these, 
as well as the shadows of the passing clouds, are not 
visible when one is standing on the ground and can see 
no further than a mile or two. The Pampa country has 
now been turned from a prairie of grass and flowers 
into huge fields divided by wire fences and intersected 
by straight roads, or rather cart tracks, marked by 
the line of brown dust that a drove of cattle or a ve- 



ARGENTINA 335 

hide raises. The landscape was in Gaucho days the same 
for hundreds of miles. It is so still, but now it wants 
the wildness and the flowers, nor has it the deep river 
channels and their overhanging bluffs which here and 
there relieve the uniformity of the North American 
prairie states. However, in many places orchards and 
clumps of other trees are being grown round the man- 
sion house. Such a clump, being the only sort of emi- 
nence that breaks the skyline, is called a Monte. The 
swift-growing Australian gum, which has now domesti- 
cated itself in most of the warmer parts of the world, 
waves its pliant tops in the breeze, more picturesque 
in the distance than it is close at hand. If man's hand 
takes something away from the wild charm of nature, 
he also by degrees creates that other charm which be- 
longs to rural life, so this land will come in time to be 
less dull and more homelike. Pleasure grounds round 
the estancias will mitigate the roughness of a first set- 
tlement, and there will be groves with dim recesses 
in their thickets to stir the imagination of children. 
There is always in the Pampas an amplitude of air 
and a solemn splendour of the sunset glow to carry the 
mind away beyond its near surroundings. 

Nevertheless one is glad not to have been born in the 
Pampas. 

Perhaps those whose early years have been passed in 
flat countries do not feel the need for hills in the land- 
scape in the same way as do the natives of Scotland or 
New England. Could any one of the latter class dwell 
for twelve months in Argentina without longing to rush 



336 SOUTH AMERICA 

off for refreshment to the mountains and lakes of the 
South Chilean Andes. 

One word more on the economic aspects of Argentina 
before I come to the people. The wealth of the land 
is in tillage and live stock. Its three great agricultural 
products are wheat, maize, and Unseed, in each of which 
it is now in the front rank of exporting countries. 
Sugar and cotton are grown in the north, and may 
increase largely there as that region gets settled, and 
wine is made at Mendoza for home consumption. 
Cereals will, however, remain the most important 
crops. Vast as has been the increase of live stock, the 
limits of the ranching area have not yet been reached. 1 
The export of meat received a great stimulus from the 
introduction of systems of cold storage and transport, 
and now an enormous amount of European and North 
American as well as Argentine capital is embarked in 
this trade. There is, so far as known, hardly any coal 
in the country, and the sources of water-power are only 
along the Southern Andes, so that manufacturing indus- 
tries have not been established on any large scale. The 
slopes of the Cordilleras furnish mines of gold, silver, 
copper, and lead, but the production of these minerals 
is small compared to that of Peru and Bolivia. The 
people have not taken to the sea either as mercantile 
mariners or as fishermen, and the demand for agricul- 
tural labour has been so large that there was no occa- 
sion for any one to seek his living in those employments. 

1 There were, in 1911, 30,000,000 cattle, 68,000,000 sheep, and 
7,500,000 horses. 



ARGENTINA 337 

Thus we may say that among those great countries 
of the world which Europeans have peopled, Argentina 
is that which is now, and is likely to continue, the most 
purely agricultural in its industrial character. 

The best evidence or illustration of the swift progress 
of the republic and of the confidence which European 
investors feel in its resources is to be found in the devel- 
opment of its railway system. The first railway line was 
opened in 1857 and was twelve miles long. In 1911 there 
were nearly 20,000 miles in operation, and the receipts in 
1910 amounted to £20,000,000. Most of these railways, 
many of which are of a gauge broader than those of the 
United States or Great Britain, have been built and 
are worked by British companies, a few by the gov- 
ernment. 1 

In this immense fertile and temperate country with 
hardly six people to a square mile, what limit can we 
set to the growth of wealth and population ? Already the 
nation is larger than the Dutch or Portuguese or Swedish. 
Within thirty years it may equal Italy. Within fifty 
years it may approach France or England, even if the 
present rate of its increase be reduced. It may one day 
be the most numerous among all the peoples that speak 
a tongue of Latin origin, as the United States is already 
the most numerous of all that speak a Teutonic one. 
Many things may happen to change its present char- 

1 The total amount of British capital invested in Argentine rail- 
roads, tramways, banks, and land was, in 1910, £295,000,000. In 
writing about a country which attracts the world chiefly by its 
material development it is impossible to avoid figures, but I wish to 
give the reader no more than are absolutely needed. 



338 SOUTH AMERICA 

acter, yet the unformed character of the youth before 
whom such a future seems to lie is well worth studying. 

First a few words about the race. No other Spanish- 
American state, except Uruguay, has a people of a stock 
so predominantly European. The aboriginal Indian 
element is too small to be worth regarding. It is now 
practically confined to the Gran Chaco in the extreme 
north, but elsewhere the influence of Indian blood is 
undiscernible among the people to-day. 1 The aborig- 
ines of the central Pampas have disappeared, — nearly 
all were killed off, — and those of Patagonia have been 
dying out. We have, therefore, a nation practically of 
pure South European blood, whose differences from the 
parent stock are due, not to the infusion of native ele- 
ments, but to local and historical causes. 

Till thirty or forty years ago this population was al- 
most entirely of Spanish stock. Then the rapid develop- 
ment of the Pampas for tillage began to create a demand 
for labour, which, while it increased immigration from 
Spain, brought in a new and larger flow from Italy. 
The Spaniards who came were largely from the northern 
provinces and among them there were many Basques, a 
race as honest and energetic as any in Europe. So far 
back as 1875 one used to see in the French Basque 
country between Biarritz and the pass of Roncesvalles 
plenty of neat and comfortable houses erected by men 
who had bought back their savings from the River 

1 There is, however, a small population of mixed Indian and 
colonial stock in the plateau of the Andean northwest adjoining 
Bolivia. 



ARGENTINA 339 

Plate. The Italians have flocked in from all parts of 
their peninsula, but the natives of the north take to 
the land, and furnish a very large part of the agricultural 
labour, while the men from the southern provinces, 
usually called Napolitanos, stay in the towns and work 
as railway and wharf porters, or as boatmen, and at 
various odd jobs. In 1909, out of 1,750,000 persons of 
foreign birth in the republic, 1 there were twice as many 
Italians as Spaniards, besides one hundred thousand 
from France, the latter including many French Basques, 
who are no more French than Spanish. Between 1904 
and 1909 the influx of immigrants had risen from 125,- 
000 annually to 255,000. The Spaniards, of course, blend 
naturally and quickly with the natives, who speak the 
same tongue. The Italians have not yet blent, for there 
has hardly yet been time for them to do so, but there 
is so much similarity, not indeed in character but in 
language and ways of life, that they will evidently be- 
come absorbed into the general population. Children 
born in the country grow up to be Argentines in sentiment, 
and are, perhaps, even more vehemently patriotic than 
the youth of native stock. 

Here, as in the United States, the birth-rate is higher 
among immigrants than among natives. In the case 
of Italians it is twice, in that of Spaniards one and a 
half times, as great. 

What effect upon the type and tendencies of the 
future nation this Italian infusion will have it is hard to 
predict, because no one knows how far national charac- 
1 844,000 were from Italy, 424,000 from Spain. 



340 SOUTH AMERICA 

ter is affected by blood admixture. We have no data 
for estimating the comparative importance of heredity 
and of environment upon a population which is the 
product of two elements, the foreign one injected into 
a larger native element whose prepotent influences 
modify the offspring of new-comers. 1 

In considering the probable result of the commingling, 
and as a fact explaining the readiness with which Italian 
immigrants allow themselves to be Argentinized, one 
must remember that these come from the humblest and 
least educated strata of Italian society. They are, like 
all Italians, naturally intelligent, but they have not 
reached that grade of knowledge which attaches men 
to the literature and the historical traditions of their 
own country. Thus, the scantiness of their education 
prevents them from making either to the intellectual 
life or to the art of their adopted country those contri- 
butions which one might expect from a people which 
has always held a place in the front rank of European 
letters, art, and science. It may be expected, however, 
that in the course of a generation or two inborn Italian 
capacity will assert itself in the descendants of the im- 
migrants. 

The other foreigners, French, English (business men 
and landowning farmers), and German (chiefly business 
men in the cities) are hardly numerous enough to affect 
the Argentine type, and the two latter have hitherto re- 

1 Some remarks upon this obscure question will be found in 
Chapter XCII of the author's American Commonwealth (edition of 
1910). The problem is rather simpler here than in the United 
States because the recently injected elements are here less various. 



ARGENTINA 341 

mained as distinct elements, being mostly Protestants 
and marrying persons of their own race. They occupy 
themselves entirely with business and have not entered 
Argentine public life; yet as many of them mean to 
remain in the country, and their children born in it 
become thereby Argentine citizens, it is likely that 
they, also, will presently be absorbed, and their Argen- 
tine descendants may figure in politics here, as families 
of Irish and British origin do in Chile. 

The social structure of the nation is the result of the 
economic conditions already described. In the rural 
districts there are two classes only, — landowners, often 
with vast domains, and labourers, the native labourers 
settled, the Italians to some extent migratory. In the 
cities there exists, between the wealthy and the work- 
ingmen, a considerable body of professional men, shop- 
keepers, and clerks, who are rather less of a defined 
middle class than they would be in European countries. 
Society is something like that of North American cities, 
for the lines between classes are not sharply drawn, and 
the spirit of social equality has gone further than in 
France, and, of course, far further than in Germany or 
Spain. One cannot speak of an aristocracy, even in the 
qualified sense in which the word could be used in Peru 
or Chile, for though a few old colonial families have the 
Spanish pride of lineage, it is, as a rule, wealth and 
wealth only that gives station and social eminence. 
Manners, which everywhere in South America have 
lost something of the courtliness of Castile, are here 
rather more " modern " than in Mexico or Lima, because 



342 SOUTH AMERICA 

the growth of wealth has brought up new men and has 
made money the criterion of eminence, or at least of 
prominence. Here, as in England and the United States, 
one sees that though the constitution is democratic, 
society has some of the characteristics of a plutocracy. 
The little that I have to say about the political life of 
the country must be reserved for another and more 
general chapter, so I will here note only two facts 
peculiar to Argentina. It is, of all the Spanish- American 
republics, that in which the church has least to do with 
politics. Though Roman Catholicism is declared by 
the constitution to be supported by the state, and the 
president and vice-president must profess it, that 
freedom of religious worship which is guaranteed by law 
is fully carried out in practice, and all denominations 
may, without let or hindrance, erect churches and 
preach and teach. The legislature has shewn itself 
so broad-minded as to grant subventions to a system 
of Protestant schools founded originally as a mission- 
ary enterprise by a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, and 
many of the Roman Catholic families of Buenos Aires 
send their children to schools provided by the Ameri- 
can Methodist Episcopal Church. In liberality of spirit, 
Argentina is rather more advanced than either Peru 
or Chile, not to speak of bigoted Ecuador. Still more 
noteworthy is it that there seems to be little or no 
effort on the part of the church to influence public 
affairs. No political party is allied with the clergy, 
no clerical influence is felt in elections. The happy 
detachment of the two spheres which travellers observe 



ARGENTINA 343 

and admire in North America deserves even more 
credit when found in a country where intolerance 
long reigned supreme. 

The other phenomenon which no one will connect 
with religious freedom, inasmuch as it has appeared in 
nearly every country of Europe and of North America, 
whatever be the religious conditions that prevail, is 
the emergence here and nowhere else in South America 
of a vehement anarchist propaganda. Among the 
immigrants from Italy and from eastern Spain there 
have been enough persons engaged in this movement 
to cause great alarm to the government. Not long 
ago the chief of the police was killed by an explosive 
thrown by a Russian anarchist, and in the summer of 
1910 a bomb was exploded in the great Opera-house dur- 
ing a performance, wounding a number of persons. 
These occurrences led to the proclamation of a state 
of siege which was maintained for many weeks. The 
police is said to be efficient, 1 and the Executive did not 
hesitate to use powers which it would be less easy to 
obtain or use in the United States or in England. Our 
age has seen too many strange incidents to be sur- 
prised that these acts of violence should be perpetrated 
in a country where, though no doubt there is an osten- 
tatious display of wealth, work is more abundant and 
wages are higher than in any other part of the world. 
Such acts are aimed not at oppression, nor at bad in- 
dustrial conditions, but at government itself. 

1 1 was told that many of the street police are Indians from the 
north of the country. 



344 SOUTH AMERICA 

Here, as generally in South America, though less in 
Chile than elsewhere, politics is mainly in the hands of 
the lawyers. A great deal of the best intellect of the 
country, probably more in proportion than in any 
European country or in the United States, goes into 
this profession; and the contributions to the world's 
store of thought and learning made by Argentine 
writers have been perhaps more considerable in this 
branch of enquiry than in any other. In the sphere of 
historical or philosophical or imaginative literature, not 
much has yet been done, nor is the class prepared to 
read such books a large one. Fiction is supplied by 
France. The press is a factor in public affairs whose 
power is comparable to that exercised by the leading 
newspapers in Australia. It is conducted on large 
and bold lines, especially conspicuous in two journals of 
the capital 1 which have now a long record of vigour 
and success behind them. The concentration of politi- 
cal and commercial activities in Buenos Aires gives to 
them the same advantage that belongs to the leading 
organs of Sydney and Melbourne. 

The world is to-day ruled by physical science and 
by business, which, in the vast proportions industry 
and commerce have now attained, is itself the child of 

1 They have a mass of readers near at hand and a revenue from 
advertisements comparable to those which are found in the United 
States and Australia, but are not found in Spanish America outside 
Buenos Aires. 

Mr. P. Seebey states that, in 1903, 212 periodicals were published 
in Buenos Aires in various languages or dialects, including Basque, 
Catalan, and Genoese. 



ARGENTINA 345 

physical science. Argentina is thoroughly modern in 
the predominance of business over all other interests. 
Only one other comes near it. The Bostonian man of 
letters who complained that London was no place to 
live in because people talked of nothing but sport and 
pohtics, would have been even less happy in Buenos 
Aires, because there, when men do not talk of sport, 
they talk of business. Pohtics is left to the politicians ; 
it is the estancia, its cattle and its crops, and the race- 
course, with its betting, that are always in the mind and 
on the tongue, and are moulding the character, of the 
wealthier class. Business is no doubt still so largely 
in the hands of foreigners that one cannot say that the 
average Argentine has developed a talent for it com- 
parable to that of those whom he calls the North Ameri- 
cans, seeing that much of his wealth has come to him 
by the rise in the values of his land and the immense 
demand for its products. He is seldom a hard worker, 
for it has been his ill fortune to be able to get by sitting 
still what others have had to work for, but he does not 
yield to New York in what is called a "go-ahead spirit." 
He is completely up to date. He has both that jubilant 
patriotism and that exuberant confidence in his country 
which marked the North American of 1830-1860. His 
pride in his city has had the excellent result of making 
him eager to put it, and keep it, in the forefront of 
progress, with buildings as fine, parks as large, a water 
supply as ample, provisions for public health as perfect, 
as money can buy or science can devise. The wealth 
and the expansion of Buenos Aires inspire him, as the 



346 SOUTH AMERICA 

wealth and expansion of Chicago have inspired her 
citizens, and give him, if not all of their forceful energy, 
yet a great deal of their civic idealism. 

It is the only kind of idealism that one finds in the 
city or the country. Every visitor is struck by the 
dominance of material interests and a material view 
of things. Compared with the raking in of money and 
the spending it in betting or in ostentatious luxury, 
a passion for the development of the country's resources 
and the adornment of its capital stand out as aims that 
widen the vision and elevate the soul. A recent acute 
and friendly observer has said that patriotism among 
the Argentines amounts to a mania. Such excess of 
sentiment is not only natural in a young and growing 
nation, and innocent too (so long as it is not aggressive), 
but is helpful in giving men something beyond their 
own material enjoyments and vanities to think of and 
to work for. It makes them wish to stand well in the 
world's eyes, and do in the best way what they see others 
doing. If there is an excess, time will correct it. 

Loitering in the great Avenida de Mayo and watch- 
ing the hurrying crowd and the whirl of motor cars, 
and the gay shop-windows, and the open-air cafes on 
the sidewalks, and the Parisian glitter of the women's 
dresses, one feels much nearer to Europe than any- 
where else in South America. Bolivia suggests the 
seventeenth century and Peru the eighteenth, and even 
in energetic Chile there is an air of the elder time, 
and a soothing sense of detachment. But here all is 
twentieth century, with suggestions of the twenty-first. 



ARGENTINA 347 

Yet, modern as they are, and reminding one sometimes 
of the gaiety of Paris and sometimes of the stir and 
hurry of Kansas City, the Argentines are essentially 
unlike either Europeans or North Americans. To say 
in what the difference consists is all the harder because 
one doubts whether there yet exists a definite Argentine 
type. They have ceased to be Spaniards without be- 
coming something new of their own. They seem to be 
a nation in the making, not yet made. Elements more 
than half of which are Spanish and Basque, and one- 
third of which are Italian, are all being shaken up 
together and beginning to mix and fuse under condi- 
tions not before seen in South American life. That 
which will emerge, if more Spanish than Italian in blood, 
will be entirely South American in sentiment and largely 
French in its ways of thinking, for from France come 
the intellectual influences that chiefly play upon it. 
It will spring from new conditions and new forces, act- 
ing on people who have left all their traditions and 
many of their habits behind them, and have retained 
but little of that religion which was the strongest of 
all powers in their former home. Men now living may 
see this nation, what with its growing numbers and 
its wealth, take rank beside France, Italy, and Spain. 
It may be, in the New World, the head and champion 
of what are called the Latin races. Will the artistic 
and literary genius of Italy, France, and Spain flower 
again in their transplanted descendants, now that they 
seem to have at last emerged from those long civil 
wars and revolutions which followed their separation 



348 SOUTH AMERICA 

from Spain? The very magnitude of the interests 
which any fresh civil wars would endanger furnishes a 
security against their recurrence, and the temper of the 
people seems entirely disposed to internal peace. No 
race or colour questions have arisen, and religious ques- 
tions have ceased to vex them. They have an agri- 
cultural area still undeveloped which for fifty years to 
come will be large enough both to attract immigrants 
and to provide for the needs of their own citizens. Sel- 
dom has Nature lavished gifts upon a people with a 
more bountiful hand. 



CHAPTER X 

URUGUAY 

Whoever wishes to have something by which to 
distinguish Uruguay from its many sister republics, 
the size and character of each of which are unfamiliar 
to many of us in Europe, may learn to remember 
that it is the smallest of the South American states, 
and that it has neither mountains, nor deserts, nor 
antiquities, nor aboriginal Indians. Nevertheless, it is 
by no means a country to be described by negatives, 
but has, as we shall presently see, a marked character 
of its own. 

Having belonged to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, 
and being peopled by men of the same pure Spanish 
stock as those who dwelt in Argentina, it would probably 
have continued to be a part of that country but for 
the fact that, as it lay close to Brazil, it was from time to 
time occupied and held by the Portuguese of that coun- 
try, sometimes by conquest, sometimes by formal cession 
from the crown of Spain. Thus its people, who had, 
when part of the Spanish dominions, a governor of their 
own under the Viceroy, began to acquire a sort of 
national consciousness as a community distinct from 
their fellow-countrymen on the opposite shore of the 
Rio de la Plata and the Uruguay river. They got 
the name of the Banda Oriental (East Side), as op- 

349 



350 SOUTH AMERICA 

posed to the rest of Argentina on the west side of the 
Uruguay. When the colonists began, from 1810 on- 
wards, to assert their independence of the crown of 
Spain, the Orientales, as the Uruguayans were then 
usually called, had to fight their own battle and fought it 
valiantly. The Portuguese of Brazil, now allying them- 
selves with Spain in defence of monarchy, invaded 
the country, and it was their expulsion in 1814, as the 
outcome of a long struggle under the famous patriot 
leader Artigas, that finally set Uruguay free. After the 
Argentines had tried more than once to force her into 
their federation, and the Portuguese had again invaded 
and occupied the devastated land, Uruguay was ulti- 
mately recognized as a sovereign State in 1828 by both 
Argentina and Brazil, the latter now independent of 
Portugal. By this time incessant wars and sufferings 
had formed a distinctive type of character and lit up a 
flame of national feeling which has burnt strongly ever 
since. 

With an area of only 72,000 square miles, as against 
1,135,000 in Argentina and 3,208,000 in Brazil, Uruguay 
seems like a garden plot between two vast estates. But 
she is a veritable garden. There is hardly an acre of use- 
less ground within her borders. Except a few bare hill- 
tops and a few sandy stretches on the coast, all is avail- 
able, either for cattle and sheep, or for tillage, or for 
forest growth. No country is more favoured by nature. 
The surface is gently undulating along the sea and rises 
inland into swelling downs intersected here and there 
by ranges of hills. The abundant grass is deemed the 



URUGUAY 351 

best for cattle in all South America, so for many years 
ranching was practically the only industry. Latterly, 
however, a great deal of land has been brought under 
cultivation. Wheat and maize are the principal 
crops, and there are now many vineyards. As the cli- 
mate, while generally resembling that of central Argen- 
tina, is tempered by the neighbourhood of the Atlantic, 
the winters are less cold and the summers cooler in 
Montevideo than they are on the other side of the 
Plate estuary. Further north, where Uruguay ad- 
joins Brazil, the midsummer heats are severe and 
the vegetation becomes subtropical. It is a cheerful 
country, with scenery constructed, so to speak, on a small 
scale, as befits a small republic. Broad uplands of 
waving grass, with here and there tree clumps, and in 
the centre and north of the country bosky glens wind- 
ing through rocky hills, make the landscape always 
pleasing and sometimes romantic. There are no great 
forests, no deserts, no volcanoes, nothing half so grand 
as the peaks of the Argentine Andes, but nothing 
half so monotonous as the flats of the Argentine 
Pampa. 

Montevideo the capital has the same air of freshness 
and cheerfulness which belong to Uruguayan landscape 
and the Uruguayan climate. It has grown to be a 
great and prosperous city in respect of its port, which 
makes it the chief seat of the republic's commerce. 
The estuary of the River Plate is much deeper on this 
northern side than on the southern, so large ships 
have always been able to approach nearer to this shore 



352 SOUTH AMERICA 

than they could do to the Argentine. By deepening the 
entrance and running out breakwaters, a good harbour 
has now been created, accessible to vessels of excep- 
tionally deep draught which could not (in 1910) come 
up to the docks in Buenos Aires. The city is also more 
fortunate in its site, for the ground, a dead flat on the 
Argentine side, here rises from the shore in a slope steep 
enough to afford fine views over the sea and to enable 
the church towers and other tall buildings to present 
an effective sky-line. 

Montevideo, with its 300,000 inhabitants against the 
1,300,000 of Buenos Aires, has streets by no means so 
thronged as are those of the Argentine capital. Neither 
are the houses quite so high, nor is there the same 
sense of a vast country behind, pouring its products out 
by this water-gate that leads to Europe. But here, 
just as in Buenos Aires, everything is modern. Only 
one public building, the old Town Hall in the chief plaza, 
dates from colonial times and has, or seems by its quaint- 
ness to have, a sort of artistic quality which is absent 
from the work, all French rather than Spanish in char- 
acter, of the last sixty years. The plazas are handsome, 
well laid out and planted, and the street architecture 
creditable, with fewer contrasts of meanness and magnifi- 
cence than one usually sees in the growing cities of North 
America. There is an absence not only of external 
squalor, but of any marks of poverty, for the people seem 
brisk and thriving, with plenty of money coming in. For 
many miles round the environs are studded with taste- 
ful villas, and the well-kept roads that traverse them 



URUGUAY 353 

are lined by splendid rows of Australian blue gums. 
Three points of interest deserve to be specially men- 
tioned. One is the Cerro, an isolated conical hill on 
the southwestern side of the bay, opposite the main city, 
and an object so conspicuous and picturesque on this 
generally tame coast that it has found a place in the arms 
of the republic. The castle that surmounts it has 
no merit as a building, but the view is superb 
along the coast and out to sea where the pale grey 
waters of the Parana and Uruguay meet the ocean blue. 
The second ornament of the suburbs is the Botanical 
Garden. Its display of spring flowers, both native and 
European, and the wonderful variety of trees from 
semitropical and temperate regions, give a vivid sense 
of the powers of this admirable climate, not oppressive 
in the blaze of its sunlight, yet warm enough for roses 
twice as luxuriant as the best that Europe can show. 
Lastly, there is a fine collection of wild animals in a 
garden belonging to a private gentleman of large means, 
who is unique in the personal relations which his kindly 
disposition has enabled him to establish with the crea- 
tures, even with the beasts of prey. There were 
splendid jaguars and pumas, and there were South 
American ant-eaters with tongues longer than them- 
selves. But what most delighted the holiday crowd, 
who are permitted to ramble through the gardens, was 
to see a brace of lion cubs strolling about in a friendly 
way among men, women, and children, while the owner 
led us close up to the bars of the cage in which his pet 
lion, a superb giant, sat peacefully blinking and made us 
2a 



354 SOUTH AMERICA 

stroke it and rub its back. The lion took the attention 
benignly and beamed on his master, but the attitude 
of the lioness in the further corner of the cage did not 
encourage any such familiarities. 

Like Argentina, Uruguay is destined to be a pastoral 
and agricultural, not a mining or manufacturing coun- 
try. There are some minerals, including gold, manga- 
nese, iron, and coal, but none of these is worked on a 
large scale, and it has not yet been proved that either 
coal or iron is present in quantities sufficient to form the 
basis of any important industry. Cattle are at present 
the chief source of wealth, the export of meat having 
been greatly increased by the recently invented methods 
of freezing and chilling. Meat, hides, wool, wheat, 
and maize are likely to continue to be the mainstay 
of the country's prosperity; and as only about one- 
eighth of the surface is at present under tillage, there 
is room for great expansion. No better evidence of 
progress can be furnished than the extension of rail- 
ways. The first was begun in 1866. There were, in 
1910, 1472 miles in operation, and construction contin- 
ues to go briskly forward. The chief centres of popu- 
lation are either on the coast or on the banks of the 
great navigable river Uruguay, whence cattle, meat, and 
wool are shipped. 

So far, therefore, Uruguay has all the material condi- 
tions required for prosperity and happiness, an abun- 
dance of good land, a temperate and genial climate, 
water highways for traffic provided by Nature in her 
rivers, artificial iron highways on land, supplied by 



URUGUAY 355 

enterprising British capitalists. What is to be said 
of her inhabitants ? 

They were, till recent years, almost entirely of Span- 
ish stock. The warlike native Indians, one of whose 
tribes, the Charruas, were fierce fighters, having been 
killed off, and the weaker tribes having quietly melted 
away, very little aboriginal blood has mingled itself 
with the Iberian stock. Some negroes are to be found 
along the Brazilian frontier, but they do not seem to 
have perceptibly affected the European element. Of 
late years a stream of immigrants has flowed in from 
Italy, yet in no such volume as toward Argentina. 
There is also a steady, though smaller, inflow from 
Spain; among whom there are, fortunately, many 
industrious Basques. Rather more than a fifth of the 
population are of foreign birth, a proportion small 
compared to that of the foreign-born population of 
Rhode Island or Massachusetts. These new-comers 
will soon be assimilated and are not likely to modify 
the national type. 

That type strikes the foreign observer as already 
distinct and well marked. The Uruguayan is, of course, 
first and foremost a Colonial Spaniard, but a Spaniard 
moulded by the conditions of his life during the last 
ninety years. He has been a man of the country and 
the open air, strong, active, and lawless, always in 
the saddle riding after his cattle, handy with his lasso 
and his gun. Fifty years ago he was a Gaucho, much 
like his Argentine cousin beyond the river. Now he, too, 
like that cousin, is settling down, but he has retained 



356 SOUTH AMERICA 

something of the breezy recklessness and audacity, the 
frankness and free-handedness, of the older days. A 
touch of this Gaucho quality, in a milder form, is felt 
through all classes of Uruguayan society. Democratic 
equality in manners is combined with a high sense of per- 
sonal dignity, an immense hopefulness, an impulsive read- 
iness to try all experiments, a national consciousness 
none the less intense because it already rejoices over the 
triumphs it is going to achieve. Whether there is 
more of "ideality" than in Argentina I will not venture 
to say, but there is less wealth and less ostentation. 
Englishmen and North Americans settled in Montevideo 
like the Uruguayans, and say they are good fellows. 
There is evidently something attractive about them 
when the sons of such settlers grow up fond of the 
country, willing and proud to be its citizens. You will 
hear an English-speaking youth of either race say, if 
asked whether he is an Englishman or an American, 
"I am an Uruguayan." 

While we were in Montevideo a revolution broke 
out in the country. There was sharp fighting about 
forty miles away from the city and the railways were 
bringing in the wounded. It caused no great excite- 
ment, having been expected for some weeks, and 
the newspapers told their readers very little of what 
was happening. They did not know much, for the 
military authorities had stopped every channel of com- 
munication. That, however, would of itself have been 
a very poor reason for not furnishing details. There 
were other and more imperative grounds for reticence. 



URUGUAY 357 

We were unfortunately unable to see anything and 
could learn little of the revolution, but its origin and 
especially the perfect sang-froid of the Montevideans, 
both natives and Englishmen, struck us as curious. 
A short explanation of the conditions attending such 
outbreaks may throw light on the phenomena of other 
republics as well as Uruguay. 

Ever since the colonists declared their independence 
of Spain, fighting has been almost incessant in this smil- 
ing land. They fought first against the Spanish troops, 
and then against the Portuguese rulers of Brazil; they 
fought several times against Argentina and Paraguay, 
and almost incessantly against one another. As soon 
as independence had been secured and the Portuguese 
finally expelled, the two leading generals (Rivera and 
Oribe) who had led the patriots to victory quarrelled, 
and before long were striving in arms for the chief 
place in the republic. Their adherents grew into two 
factions, which soon divided the nation, or so much of 
it as took an active interest in politics. At the first 
battle General Oribe, who headed one of the parties, rode 
a white horse, and his lancers carried white pennons on 
their spearheads ; so they were called the Blancos. The 
followers of the rival general, Rivera, had red pennons, 
and he rode a bay horse. They were, therefore, the 
Colorados. From that day on Uruguayans have been 
divided into Whites and Reds. Seventy-five years had 
passed and the grandsons of the men who had fought 
under Oribe and Rivera in 1835 were still fighting in 
1910. 



358 SOUTH AMERICA 

For what have they been fighting? At first there 
were no principles involved ; it was a personal feud 
between two soldiers, who not long before had stood 
shoulder to shoulder against the Brazilian invader. But 
just as political parties sometimes drop the tenets with 
which they started and yet live on as organizations, so 
sometimes factions which started without tenets pick 
them up as they go along and make them watchwords. 
A party is apt to capture any current issue, or be cap- 
tured by it, and to become, thereafter, committed to or 
entangled with it. Thus the Whites became in course 
of time the country party as opposed to the Reds of the 
towns, and especially of Montevideo, and thus, as the 
city is the home of new views and desires for change, 
the Reds have become the anticlerical and the Whites 
the church party. It would seem that the colours 
have nothing to do with the now almost forgotten term 
(common in France in 1848-1851) of the "Red Repub- 
lic," but another sort of connection with Europe may 
be found in the story that the Garibaldian red shirt, 
which figured on so many battle-fields in Sicily and 
Italy, was due to Giuseppe Garibaldi's having fought 
on the Colorado side, in 1842-1846, against Rosas and 
the Argentine invaders, the emblem being retained 
when that last of the heroes raised his standard in the 
Italian revolution of 1848. 1 



1 The account of the origin of the red shirt given by Mr. G. M. 
Trevelyan in his interesting book, Garibaldi and the Defence of- Rome, 
is not quite the same as that which I heard in Uruguay, but not 
incompatible therewith. 



URUGUAY 359 

When an insurrection is planned in Uruguay, word is 
sent round that its supporters are to rendezvous, armed 
and mounted, at certain spots on a certain day, and 
when the government gets to know of the plan, its first 
step is to seize all the horses in the disaffected districts 
and drive them to a place where they are kept under 
a strong guard. The horse is the life of a revolutionary 
movement, a tradition from the grand old Gaucho days ; 
and without horses, the insurgents are powerless. 

The Blancos have been out of power in Uruguay 
since 1864, but they hold well together and compose an 
opposition which acts by constitutional methods in the 
legislature (when any of its partisans can find an en- 
trance) and by military methods outside the constitu- 
tion, in the open country, whenever peaceful methods 
are deemed useless. The parties have become largely 
hereditary; a child is born a little Blanco or a little 
Colorado, and rarely deserts his colour. Feeling runs 
so high that in Blanco districts it is dangerous for a 
man to wear a red necktie, just as in driving through 
certain Irish towns a harmless botanist from Britain 
may, when his car approaches a particular quarter, be 
warned by the driver to throw away or cover over the 
ferns which he has gathered in a mountain glen, because 
the sight of the obnoxious colour will expose him to be 
stoned by those who regard its display as an affront. 

These revolutions, however, have in the course of 
years been tending to become rather less frequent, and 
certainly less sanguinary, just as in parts of South 
America there are volcanoes once terrible by their tre- 



360 SOUTH AMERICA 

mendous eruptions which now content themselves with 
throwing out a few showers of ashes or discharging a 
stream of lava from a little crater near the base. This 
rising ended with a surrender, accompanied by an 
amnesty which included the absence of any decree of 
confiscation of property, so no blood was shed except 
in the field. 

When I asked what were the grievances alleged to 
justify the revolt of November, 1910, the answer was 
that an election of the legislature was impending, that 
the new legislature would, when elected, proceed forth- 
with to the choice of a President of the republic for the 
next four years, that the Blancos fully expected that 
the elections would be so handled by the government 
in power as to secure a majority certain to choose a 
particular candidate whom the Blancos feared and dis- 
liked, and that therefore the only course open to the 
latter was to avert by an appeal to arms the wrong 
which would be done to the nation by tampering with 
the rights of the electors. How much truth there may 
have been in these allegations the passing traveller could 
not know, nor was it for him to judge whether, if true, 
they would warrant an appeal to force. 

The conditions in some Latin- American republics are 
peculiar, and can be paralleled only in one or two other 
parts of the modern world. In the years between 1848 
and 1859 when despotic governments held sway in 
most parts of Europe, the ingenuous youth of Britain 
used to assume, as Thomas Jefferson had done fifty 
years before, that every insurrection was presumably 



URUGUAY 361 

justifiable and entitled to the sympathy of all lovers 
of freedom. Of recent years, since constitutional gov- 
ernments have been established in nearly all countries, 
the presumption is deemed to be the other way, and 
revolts are prima facie disapproved. In some American 
republics, however, — and here I am speaking not of 
Uruguay, but of more backward communities, — there 
is no presumption at all either way. A government in 
Nicaragua or Honduras, for instance, has usually ob- 
tained power either by force of arms or by a mock elec- 
tion carried through under military pressure. To eject 
it by similar means is, therefore, in the eye of a consti- 
tutional lawyer, not a breach of law and order, because 
the government which it is sought to eject has no legal 
title, being itself the child of wrongdoing. On the other 
hand the insurgents are probably no better friends of 
law and order than is the government. If they succeed 
by arms, they will not hold an honest election, but will 
rule by force, just as did their predecessors. There is, 
accordingly, no ground for the award of sympathy or 
moral approval to either faction, while for foreign powers 
the problem of when to recognize a government that has 
come in by the sword, and will presently, like the Priest 
of the Grove at Nemi, perish by the sword, is no easy 
one, and must usually be solved by waiting till such a 
government has made itself so clearly master of the sit- 
uation as to possess a de facto title likely to hold good 
for some time to come, and perhaps ultimately pass 
into a title de iure. 1 

1 Such, legal or quasi-legal questions have arisen several times in 
Central America. 



362 SOUTH AMERICA 

Reverting to Uruguay, the most curious and histori- 
cally instructive feature of her case is that these re- 
current civil wars and attempts at revolution do not 
seem to have retarded her prosperity. She saw more 
incessant fighting from 1810 till 1876 than any other 
part of the world has seen for the last hundred years. 
Even since then risings and conflicts have been fre- 
quent, and though there has been no foreign war since 
1870, when that with Paraguay ended, the presence 
on either side of two great powers, not always friendly 
to her or to each other, has often caused anxiety. 
Nevertheless, the country has continued to grow in 
wealth and population. Capital has flowed in freely to 
build railways, and the good opinion which European 
investors entertain is shewn by the fact that the Uru- 
guayan five per cent bonds average just about par in 
the London stock market. Foreign trade has increased 
fivefold since 1862. Without forsaking their love of 
fighting, the people have turned to work, and the land 
or cattle owner depends less on foreign labour than he 
does in Argentina. Thus it would seem that as there 
have been countries ruined by war — as Central Asia 
Minor was by the long strife between the Seljukian 
Turks and the East Roman Emperors, and as Ger- 
many suffered from the Thirty Years' War injuries 
it cost her nearly two centuries to repair, so there 
are countries which have thriven in the midst of 
war. In the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. the Greek 
cities of Sicily were seldom at peace. They fought 
with the Carthaginians, they fought with one another, 



URUGUAY 363 

they fought for or against a Tyrant within their own 
walls ; and all this fighting was done by citizen soldiers. 
Yet they throve and erected those majestic temples 
whose ruins we admire at Girgenti and Selinunte, while 
the iron peace of Rome in those later days, when the 
island had been made a province, brought to the country 
folk misery interrupted only by servile insurrections. 

The occasional recurrence of such incidents as that of 
November, 1910, had not for some years prior to my 
visit prevented the government of Uruguay from 
emulating that of Argentina in efforts to keep abreast 
of Europe in all sorts of administrative schemes for the 
advancement of education, and for the development 
of the country. In two respects it has entered on a pol- 
icy different from that of other South American states. 
It is the only one in which schemes or ideas tending 
towards state socialism have been countenanced by the 
Executive, and it is also the only one in which there is 
a distinctly antireligious party. In Peru the church 
has still some political influence. In Chile she has less, 
in Argentina practically none, but in neither is she the 
object of hostility. Here, however, a section of the 
dominant party is professedly antagonistic to the church, 
and this would seem to be due not to any provocation 
given recently by the clergy, whose Blanco friends have 
been long out of power, but rather to a spirit which 
seeks to strike at and eliminate religion itself. 

Such a movement does not seem, any more than do 
socialistic ideas, to be a natural growth of the Uru- 
guayan soil. Just as the anarchistic propaganda in 



364 SOUTH AMERICA 

Argentina has been recently brought thither from Eu- 
rope by immigrants, so this less fierce expression of the 
revolutionary spirit bears marks of having been trans- 
planted from those parts of southern Europe where the 
more violent advocates of change regard not only the 
Roman Church, but religion itself, as hostile to progress 
and to the reconstruction of society on a new basis. 
The rural population of Uruguay are not the sort of 
people among whom such ideas would spontaneously 
arise, for they belong, so far as their beliefs and views 
of life are concerned, rather to the eighteenth than to 
the twentieth century. Elsewhere in South America, 
enmity to the church has been due to the power she 
has exercised in the secular world, or to the memory of 
her old habits of repression. One does not hear, how- 
ever, that she has for a long time past been politically 
obnoxious here ; nor can there have been any memories 
of serious persecution to provoke hatred, for the era of 
persecution was passing away when these regions be- 
gan to be thickly settled. 

With her temperate climate and her fertile soil, Uru- 
guay is an attractive country. In no part of South 
America, except perhaps southern Chile, would a Euro- 
pean feel more disposed to settle down for life. The peo- 
ple are of pure European stock and have many of the 
qualities — frankness and energy, courage, and a high 
sense of honour — which make for political progress. 
The country is no doubt comparatively small, and it is 
the fashion nowadays to worship bigness and disparage 
small nations. Yet the independent city communities, 



URUGUAY 365 

or the small nations — such as were England and Hol- 
land in the seventeenth century — have produced not 
only most of the best literature and art, but most of 
the great men and great achievements which history 
records. National life is apt to be more intense and 
more interesting where it is concentrated in an area 
not so wide as to forbid the people to know one another 
and their leaders. Thus one cannot but hope that the 
Uruguayans, with some favouring conditions, and with- 
out the disadvantage of excessive wealth suddenly ac- 
quired, will seriously endeavour to smooth the road, 
now rough and dangerous, over which the chariot of 
their republican government has to travel. It is not 
the Constitution that is at fault, but the way in which 
the Constitution is worked. The backward state of 
education and consequent incompetence of the ordinary 
citizen is usually assigned as the source of political 
troubles. There is certainly an inadequate provision 
both here and generally in South America of elemen- 
tary and secondary schools. But the experience of 
many countries has shewn that the education of the 
masses is not enough to secure a reform in political 
methods. There is surely force in the view I heard 
expressed, that if the whole population, or even the 
whole of the educated class in the population, were to 
exert themselves to take more active part in politics, 
they could set things right by checking the abuses or 
grievances out of which revolutions grow and by mod- 
erating the party spirit which rushes to arms when 
grievances remain unredressed. 



CHAPTER XI 

BRAZIL 

That more than half of South America was settled 
by and still belongs to the men of Portugal is due to 
what may be called an historical accident. In the 
year following the discovery of the West Indies by 
Columbus, Pope Alexander the Sixth issued his famous 
Bull (a.d. 1493) which assigned to the Crown of Castile 
and Leon " all the islands and lands to be discovered in 
the seas to the west and the south of a meridian line to 
be drawn from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole, one 
hundred leagues to the west of Cape Verde and the 
Azores." Though there is in the Bull no mention of 
Portugal, it was intended to reserve the rights of 
Portugal in whatever she had discovered or might dis- 
cover on the other, i.e. the eastern, side of the line of 
delimitation. The Portuguese, however, were not sat- 
isfied, and next year a treaty between Spain and Por- 
tugal moved the line three hundred and seventy leagues 
farther west. This had the effect, as discovery pro- 
gressed, of giving to Portugal the eastern, to Spain the 
western, part of the Continent which was first touched 
by Columbus in his third voyage (1498). Now it so 
happened that one of the first navigators who actually 
saw that eastern part was a Portuguese, named Cabral. 
Driven out of his course while sailing for India, in a.d. 

366 



BRAZIL 367 

1500, he touched the South American coast, in latitude 
8° south, and took possession of it in the name of his 
sovereign. A few months earlier the Spanish sailor, 
Pinzon, had struck the same coast and had taken pos- 
session of it for Spain, but as Spain had plenty of dis- 
covered land already, and did not care to depart from 
her treaty of 1494, the territory was left to Portugal. 
Both nations had recognized the Pope as the authority 
entitled to dispose of all new-found lands, and possibly 
they may have supposed in 1500 that these new lands 
were part of the same Indies which Portugal had 
reached by the eastern route in 1498, six years after 
Columbus had, as was then supposed, reached them 
by the western. 1 Thus Brazil became and has ever 
since remained a Portuguese country, except during 
the eclipse of Portugal, when, after the death of King 
Sebastian, it fell for a time under the Crown of 
Spain. 

The area of Brazil is about 3,300,000 square miles, 
larger than that of the United States, and more than 
double that of India. Most of its territory is inhabited 
only by aboriginal Indians, many of them wild savages, 
and a good deal is still practically unexplored. As I saw, 
and can attempt to describe, only a very small part, 
it may be proper, lest any reader should fancy that 
particular part to be typical of the whole, to sketch very 
briefly the general features of the country. 

1 This question is involved with that relating to the voyages, 
real or alleged, of Americus Vespuceius in 1497, and is too intricate 
to be discussed here. 



368 SOUTH AMERICA 

It is geologically one of the oldest parts of the South 
American Continent. The mountains which form its 
central nucleus stood where they stand now long before 
the great volcanoes of the Andes, such as Aconcagua 
and Chimborazo, had been raised. This mountain cen- 
tre of the country falls abruptly on the east to the At- 
lantic, more gently on the west towards the level ground 
in the middle of the Continent, and is composed of an- 
cient crystalline rocks, which have probably been re- 
duced from a much greater height by the action of rain, 
sun, and wind, continued through countless ages. It 
may be roughly described as an undulating plateau, 800 
miles long by 300 broad, traversed by various ranges 
which are seldom of great height. Their loftiest summit 
is Italiaya, about fifty miles to the southwest of Rio de 
Janeiro and nearly 10,000 feet high. Few exceed 7000 
feet, while the average elevation of the highlands as a 
whole is from 2000 to 3000. The scenery of their richly 
wooded eastern side, where they break down steeply 
towards the Atlantic, is as beautiful as can be found 
anywhere in the tropics. They are continued northward 
and southward in lower hills, and on the west sub- 
side gently, sometimes in long slopes, sometimes in a 
succession of broad terraces, into a vast plain, only 
slightly raised above sea-level, from which streams 
flow southward into the Parana, northward into the 
Amazon. In this plain, still imperfectly explored, 
Brazil touches Paraguay and Bolivia. The inland 
regions, both highlands and plains, are less humid 
and, therefore, less densely wooded than is the line of 



BRAZIL 369 

mountains which faces the Atlantic, the climate stead- 
ily growing drier as one goes inland from the rain-giving 
ocean. Large parts of them are believed to be fit only 
for ranching, but settlement has in the western districts 
not gone far enough to determine their capacity for 
agriculture, though it is known that some are unprofit- 
able because marshy and others because sandy. On 
the other hand the country south of latitude 20° is for 
the most part fertile and well watered, and more de- 
veloped than any other part of Brazil except the coast 
strip. 

There remains another and still larger region which 
lies in the northwest part of the republic ; I mean the 
vast plain of the Amazon and its tributaries. It is 
the so-called Selvas, or woodland country, covered 
everywhere by a dense forest and for part of the year 
so flooded by the tropical rains which raise its rivers 
above their banks that much of it can be trav- 
ersed only in boats. Except for a few white settle- 
ments here and there, its sole inhabitants are the un- 
civilized Indian tribes, of whom there may be several 
hundred thousands in all, a number very small when 
compared to the space over which they are scattered. 
To these Selvas and their possible future I shall re- 
turn. 1 Meanwhile the reader will have gathered that : 
(1) The whole eastern part of Brazil from latitude 5° 
south to latitude 30° south is mountainous or undulat- 
ing, with here and there wide valleys. All of this country 
is valuable either for cultivation, for pasture, or for tim- 

1 See Chapter XVI, post. 
2b 



370 SOUTH AMERICA 

ber, and it contains rich mines. (2) The western part 
and the whole plain of the Amazon and its tributaries 
is practically quite flat, and most of it is a forest wil- 
derness. (3) Though there are some arid districts along 
the coast north and south of the mouth of the Amazon, 
there are nowhere in Brazil such deserts as those which 
cover so large a space in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and 
Argentina. (4) The only parts that are as yet com- 
paratively well-peopled are the coast strip and the fertile 
valleys debouching on that strip, some inland districts 
in the state of Minas Geraes, and in the southern states 
of Sao Paulo, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande do Sul. 
Even in these the population is still far below the ca- 
pacities of the country. 

I have made these few remarks in order to give the 
reader some notion of the general features of this im- 
mense country. The only parts I saw were on the east 
coast ; and these I shall try to describe before returning 
to a discussion of the people and prospects of Brazil as 
a whole. 

The south Atlantic all the way from Buenos Aires 
to the Amazon has the credit of giving passages 
as smooth and pleasant as any in the world. Very 
different was our experience between Montevideo and 
Santos, for there was some rain, more wind, and quite 
a heavy sea, with weather so thick that little could be 
seen of the coast along which we sailed. We were, of 
course, told that it was "quite exceptional weather," 
but old travellers know that nothing is commoner than 
exceptional weather. 



BRAZIL 371 

When at last our steamer, rounding a lofty cape, 
turned her prow shoreward to enter the harbour of 
Santos, how unlike was the landscape to any which 
we had seen since passing the Equator at the north- 
ern extremity of Peru. All down the west coast 
there had been a stern and mostly barren coast, 
with cold grey clouds over a cold grey sea. But 
here at last were the tropics. Here was the region 
of abundant and luxuriant vegetation, a soft, moist 
air and a sea of vivid blue, with the strange thin- 
bodied, long-winged frigate birds hovering above it. As 
we came near enough to see the waves foaming on the 
rocks, an amphitheatre of mountains was disclosed, sur- 
rounding the broad, flat valley through which a river 
descends to form the port of Santos. To the north 
there ran along the coast a line of lofty promontories 
against which the surges rose. The mountains be- 
hind, all densely wooded, were shrouded with heavy 
mists, but the sun bathed in light the banks of the 
river, covered with low trees and flowering shrubs, and 
the gaily painted houses of the suburb which stretches 
out from the town of Santos, embowered in palm 
groves, to the white sands of the ocean beach. 

Moving slowly up the winding channel into 
smooth water, we found many British and German 
ships lying at the wharves, for the harbour has 
now been so deepened as to admit large steamers, and 
its improvements, accompanied by draining opera- 
tions, have made the place reasonably healthy. 
Twenty years ago it was a nest of yellow fever. I was 



372 SOUTH AMERICA 

told that once, during an inroad of that plague, forty- 
three British ships were lying idle in the river with 
their crews all dead or dying. Now the disease has 
practically disappeared, and the port is one of the 
busiest in South America, since it is the exporting 
centre for the produce of the vast coffee country which 
lies inland. All day long, and during the night, too, 
at some seasons, an endless string of stalwart porters 
may be seen carrying sacks of coffee from the railroad 
cars on the wharf to the ships lying alongside. In 1910 
coffee to the value of nearly £19,000,000 ($93,107,000) 
was exported from Santos, more than half of what 
went out of Brazil to all quarters of the globe. 

Such a trade gives plenty of traffic to the railway 
which connects the coffee-planting interior and the 
thriving city of Sao Paulo with the sea. It is quite a 
remarkable railway. First built in 1867, its most 
difficult portion, which climbs a very steep slope, was 
laid out afresh along a better line between 1895 and 
1901, and is a really skilful and interesting piece of engi- 
neering performed for a British company by British 
engineers and contractors. As was observed a few 
pages back, there lies behind this part of the Brazilian 
coast a plateau, here averaging from 2500 to 3000 feet 
in height, which breaks down abruptly to the sea. The 
edge of the plateau, which, from below, appears like a 
mountain range, is called the Serra do Mar (Sea Range). 
To reach the plateau from the flats at sea-level it was 
necessary to ascend some 2500 feet, and this had to be 
done in a distance of about six miles, which means an 



BRAZIL 373 

average gradient of about eight per cent from the bottom 
to the top of the slope. The line has accordingly been 
constructed in a series of five inclines, on which the trains 
are worked by wire-rope haulage, each incline having its 
own power-house and haulage plant, and safety being 
secured not only by the " locomotive brake" which is 
attached as a last car to each ascending and descending 
train, but also by the simultaneous descent and ascent 
of trains each way, and other devices too numerous to 
describe. These, taken together, are sufficient to en- 
sure perfect safety. The extraordinary completeness and 
finish of every part not only of the roadbed and rails, but 
also of the stations and other buildings, and of the iron 
bridges and the thirteen tunnels, together with the neatly 
set tile drains which have been laid down the slopes to 
carry off in channels the rainwater which might other- 
wise dislodge loose earth from above and weaken the 
embankments below, — all these things witness to the 
unusual success and prosperity of the line as a business 
undertaking. It has been the best-paying one, next 
to that at Panama, in South America. Since the 
dividend assignable to the shareholders is restricted, the 
directors spend their surplus in securing not only effi- 
ciency and security, but even elegance. The saying, 
current among Europeans in Brazil, is that the only 
thing that remains to be done upon the Sao Paulo and 
Santos line is to gild the tops of the telegraph poles. 

The scenery, which we saw to advantage from seats 
placed in front of the leading car, is extremely beautiful 
as the train winds along steep slopes from which one 



374 SOUTH AMERICA 

looks down into richly wooded glens, with tiny water* 
falls descending through ravines amid a profusion of tall 
ferns. It is a very wet bit of country, and before reach- 
ing the top, we were enveloped in clouds and heavy rain, 
and so lost what are perhaps the finest views, those look- 
ing back from the higher levels down the main valley 
and out to the now distant ocean. On the top one 
seemed suddenly to lose sight of the mountains, for we 
came out upon level ground without any descent to 
the other side of the hill. The weather cleared, and 
across a sparsely wooded undulating plain, in some 
parts open moorland, in other parts under tillage, 
we could descry distant peaks that rose sharp and clear 
in the less humid air. Whoever has travelled from 
north to south in Spain will remember a similarly 
abrupt transition when the railway, after climbing the 
mountains south of Santander, dripping with the rain- 
storms that constantly drive in from the Bay of Biscay, 
emerges on the bare dry plateau of Old Castile. 

The train, speeding along the perfectly smooth road- 
bed which this gilt-edged railroad boasts, brought us 
after fifty miles to the city of Sao Paulo, the briskest 
and most progressive place in all Brazil, though with 
less than half the population of Rio de Janeiro. It is one 
of the oldest towns in the country, founded in 1553 by a 
Jesuit missionary. The early settlers, many of whom 
intermarried with the native Indians, became the par- 
ents of a singularly bold and energetic race, who, in their 
search for gold and silver, explored the land and raided 
the Indians and whites, too, if there were any, all the way 



BRAZIL 373 

down from here to the Uruguay and Parand, rivers. In 
those days the Portuguese government at Bahia, far off 
and weak, seldom interfered with its subjects. The free 
spirit of these "Paulistas" has passed to their descen- 
dants. Living in healthy uplands, they have shewn more 
industrial and political activity than the people of any 
other state in the federation. Since 1875 the planting 
of enormous tracts of land with coffee has rapidly raised 
the wealth of the region, and this city, being its heart 
and centre, has risen in sixty years from a small country 
town to be a place of four hundred thousand inhabitants. 
It stands upon several hills, from the highest of 
which there are charming views to the picturesque 
ranges to the north and along the valley of its river, 
the Tiete. Rising only thirty miles from the sea, 
this stream flows away northwestward to join the 
Parana and enter the ocean above Buenos Aires, the 
slope of all this region, so soon as one has crossed the 
Serra do Mar, being from east to west. The city has 
grown so fast as to shew few traces of its antiquity, except 
in the centre, where the narrow and crooked streets 
of the business quarter have a picturesque variety rarely 
found in the rectangular towns of the New World. The 
alert faces, and the air of stir and movement, as well as 
handsome public buildings rising on all hands, with a 
large, well-planted public garden in the middle of the city, 
give the impression of energy and progress . This plateau 
air is keen and bright, and, though the summer sun was 
strong, for we were in mid November, the nights were 
cool, and the winter, which sometimes brings slight frosts, 



376 SOUTH AMERICA 

restores men to physical vigour. We drove out a few 
miles to see the Independence Building, a tall pile, which 
from its hilltop looks over a wide stretch of rolling coun- 
try. It was erected to commemorate the revolt of Brazil 
from Portugal in 1822, and contains what is one of the 
largest fresco paintings in the world, shewing Dom Pedro 
of Braganza, then Regent of Brazil, surrounded by his 
generals, proclaiming the independence of the na- 
tion, a spirited if somewhat theatrical composition. 
There is a collection of objects of natural history, as 
well as of native weapons and ornaments, but both here 
and elsewhere in Brazil, and, indeed, generally in South 
America, one is struck by the small amount of interest 
shewn in all branches of knowledge, except such as have 
a direct practical bearing and pecuniary value. Con- 
sidering the enormous field of research which this 
Continent presents, and what advances have been 
made in scientific natural history during the last sixty 
years, far too little is being done to gather or to arrange 
and classify specimens illustrative either of the world of 
nature or of prehistoric and savage man. The collections 
are for the most part inferior to what European muse- 
ums were seventy years ago. Let it be said, on the other 
hand, that the state of Sao Paulo has set an admirable 
example to the rest of Brazil in the liberal provision it 
is making for elementary schools. 

Many immigrants from Italy have in the last decade 
entered the state and the city, and now by their labour 
contribute largely to the prosperity of both. Negroes 
are comparatively few ; it is these Italians that do the 



BRAZIL 377 

most and the best of the work. The larger business, both 
commercial and industrial, for there are now a good 
many factories, is chiefly in the hands of foreigners, 
Italians, Germans, and English, with a few French, a 
state of things which accelerates material progress and 
leaves the native or Portuguese Brazilians more free to 
devote themselves to politics, a sphere of action into 
which, as already observed, the modern Paulistas have 
carried the energy of their ancestors. The state is not 
only the most prosperous, but politically the most influ- 
ential, in the republic. One way or another, what with 
Paulistas and foreigners, city and state are vigorous com- 
munities, and to see them disabuses the traveller of the 
common belief that the South Americans are slack and 
inert. 

The railway — a government line — from Sao Paulo 
to Rio runs at first through that high, rolling country 
which lies behind the escarpment facing to the coast. Its 
variety of surface, and its patches of woodland, the trees 
handsome though seldom tall, make it very pretty, and 
there are glimpses of the mountain range to the west, one 
of whose summits is the loftiest in all Brazil. The line, 
as it approaches the coast, begins to descend, running 
along the edge of deep gorges, where the bright green 
herbage and luxuriant growths of shrubs and ferns 
contrast with the deep red of the soil produced by 
the decomposition of granitic rocks. After the arid 
severity of the Andean valleys of Argentina and 
Bolivia, and the sternness of chilly Patagonia, there 
was something cheering in this exuberance of vege- 



378 SOUTH AMERICA 

tation, this sense that Nature is doing her best to give 
man a chance to live easily and happily. The train 
sweeps down a long ravine, and passes many a water- 
fall, till at last the ravine becomes a wide valley and 
opens into the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. 

How is one to describe Rio ? I had read a score of 
descriptions, yet none of them had prepared me for the 
reality. Why should a twenty-first description be any 
more successful ? Its bay has been compared to the bays 
of Naples, of Palermo, of Sydney, of San Francisco, of 
Hongkong, and of Bombay, as well as to the Bosphorus. 
It is not in the least like any of these, except in being 
beautiful, nor, I should fancy, is it like any other place 
in the world. Suppose the bottom of the Yosemite 
Valley, or that of the valley of Auronzo in the Venetian 
Alps, filled with water, and the effect would be some- 
thing like the bay of Rio. Yet the superb vegetation 
would be wanting, and the views to far-away mountains, 
and the sense of the presence of the blue ocean outside 
the capes that guard the entrance. 

The name (River of January) suggests a river, but 
this was a mistake of the Portuguese discoverers, for 
nothing but trifling streams enter this great inlet. It 
is a landlocked gulf, twenty miles long and from five 
to ten miles wide, approached from the ocean through a 
channel less than a mile wide between rocky promontories 
upon which forts have been erected. On the north side, 
inside the entrance, is the town of Nictheroy, whose name 
commemorates a long-extinct tribe of Indians. Bold 
rocky isles lie in front of it and high hills rise behind. 



BRAZIL 379 

The city of Rio lies upon the south side of the gulf, the 
great bulk of it inside, though two or three suburbs have 
now grown up which stretch across a neck of land to the 
ocean. It runs along the shore for five or six miles, oc- 
cupying all the space between the water and the moun- 
tains behind, and cut up into several sections by steep 
ridges which come down from the mountains and jut out 
into the water. The coast-line is extremely irregular, 
for between these jutting promontories it recedes into 
inlets, so that when one looks at Rio, either from 
offshore in front or from the mountain tops behind, it 
seems like a succession of towns planted around inlets 
and divided from one another by wooded heights. All 
these sections are connected by a line of avenues 
running nearly parallel to the coast, so that the city 
sometimes narrows to a couple of hundred yards, 
sometimes widens out where there is a level space 
between the water and the hills, sometimes climbs 
the hill slopes, and mingles its white houses with 
the groves that cover their sides. Behind all stands 
up the mountain wall, in most places clothed with 
luxuriant forests, but in others rising in precipices 
of grey granite or single shafts of rock. Thus Rio 
stands hemmed in between mountains and bays. There 
is hardly a spot where, looking up or down a street, 
one does not see the vista closed either by the waving 
green of forest or the sparkling blue of sea. 

Other cities there are where mountains rising 
around form a noble background and refresh the heart 
of such town dwellers as have learnt to love them. "I 



380 SOUTH AMERICA 

will lift mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my 
aid." Such cities are Athens and Smyrna, Genoa and 
Palermo, San Francisco and Santiago de Chile. But in 
Rio the mountains seem to be almost a part of the city, 
for it clings and laps round their spurs just as the sea 
below laps round the capes that project into the bay. 
Nor does one see elsewhere such weird forms rising 
directly from the yards and gardens of the houses. 
One can hardly take one's eyes off the two strangest 
among these, which are also the most prominent in 
every prospect. The Pan de Azucar (Sugar Loaf) is 
a cone of bare granite, so steep as to be scaleable 
at one point only by the boldest climbers, which stands 
on the ridge between the bay and the ocean. The 
other peak is the still loftier Corcovado, a vertical 
shaft of rock something like the Aiguille de Dru, 1 
which springs right out of the houses to a height of 
over two thousand three hundred feet. Such strange 
mountain forms give to the landscape of the city a sort 
of bizarre air. They are things to dream of, not to 
tell. They remind one of those bits of fantastic rock 
scenery which Leonardo da Vinci loved to put in as 
backgrounds, though the rocks of Rio are far higher, and 
are also harder. A painter might think the landscapes 
altogether too startling for treatment, and few painters 
could handle so vast a canvas as would be needed to 
give the impression which a general view makes. Yet 
the grotesqueness of the shapes is lost in the splendour 
of the whole, — a flood of sunshine, a strand of dazzling 
1 Opposite the Montanvert at Chamouni. 



BRAZIL 381 

white, a sea of turquoise blue, a feathery forest ready 
to fall from its cliff upon the city in a cascade of liv- 
ing green. 

It is hard for man to make any city worthy of 
such surroundings as Nature has given to Rio. 
Except for two or three old-fashioned streets in the 
business quarter near the port and arsenal, it is all 
modern, and such picturesqueness as there is belongs 
to the varying lines of shore and hill, and to the in- 
terspersed gardens. A handsome modern thorough- 
fare, the Avenida Central, has been run through what 
used to be a crowded mass of mean houses, and it has 
the gay effectiveness of a Parisian boulevard. Villas 
surrounded by trees crown the hills that rise here 
and there ■ and one street is lined by two magnificent 
rows of Royal palms, their stems straight and smooth 
as marble pillars, crested by plumes of foliage. At the 
east end of the city the semicircular bay of Botafogo 
is surrounded by a superb palm-planted esplanade, 
whose parapet commands the finest general view over 
the entrance to the bay and the heights behind Nictheroy, 
and as far as the Organ Mountains which rise in a row 
of lofty pinnacles thirty miles away. 

In such a city, the curious traveller does not need 
to hunt for sixteenth-century churches or quaint old 
colonial houses. Enough for him that the settings of 
the buildings are so striking. The strong light and 
the deep shadows, and the varied colours of the walls 
and roofs of the houses, the scarlet flowers climbing 
over the walls, and the great glossy dark green leaves of 



382 SOUTH AMERICA 

the trees that fill the gardens, with incomparable back- 
grounds of rock and sea, — all these are enough to make 
the streets delightful. 

Not less delightful are the environs. The Botanic 
Garden about a mile away has long been famous for 
its wonderful avenue of royal palms, each one hundred 
feet high, all grown from the seed of one planted a 
hundred years ago, in the days when the king of Portu- 
gal held his court here. But it has other things to shew, 
equally beautiful and more interesting to the botanist. 
Not even the garden of Calcutta contains a more re- 
markable collection of tropical trees, and its vistas of 
foliage and bowery hollows overarched by tall bam- 
boos are enchanting. As respects situation, there is, 
of course, no comparison ; for at Calcutta, as at our own 
Kew, all is flat, while here the precipices of the Cor- 
covado on the one side, and the still grander crags of 
the Tijuca and Gavea on the other, shoot up thousands 
of feet into the blue. 

A longer excursion to the south of the city carries one 
in the course of a five hours' drive through a succession 
of mountain landscapes unsurpassed even in Brazil. 
A road winds up the hillside through leafy glens, where 
climbing plants and tree-ferns fill the space between the 
trunks of the great trees. Now and then it comes 
out on the top of a ridge, and one looks down into 
the abysmal depths of forest, bathed in vaporous sun- 
light. Through a labyrinth of valleys one reaches a 
clearing in the forest, above which is seen the beautiful 
peak of Tijuca, and beyond it, still higher, the amazing 



BRAZIL 383 

Gavea, a square-sided, flat-topped tower of granite. 
In their boldness of line these peaks remind one of those 
that stand up round the Mer de Glace at Chamouni. 
There moraines and masses of fallen stones are heaped 
upon the bases of these Aiguilles, and nothing breaks 
the savage bareness of their sides except snow beds in 
the couloirs. Here the peaks rise out of a billowy sea 
of verdure. The steepness of their faces seems to defy 
the climber ; yet on their faces there are crevices just 
big enough for shrubs to root in, by the help of which 
a daring man might pull himself aloft. Nature, 
having first hewn out these peaks into appalling 
precipices, then set herself to deck them with climb- 
ing plants and to find foothold for trees on narrow 
ledges and to cover the surface with the bright hues 
of mosses and lichens, and fill chinks and crannies 
with ferns and pendulous flowers that wave and sway 
in the passing breeze. Some way further, from the 
top of a gap between the peaks, the open ocean is 
suddenly seen a thousand feet below, its intense blue 
framed between green hills, with long billows rushing 
up over the white sands of the bay, and fines of spray 
sparkling round the rocky isles that rise beyond, like 
the summits of submerged mountains. 

Though the bay of Rio was discovered as far back as 
1531 by the Portuguese sailor who took its mouth for a 
river, and was settled not long after, first by Frenchmen 
in 1558 and then by Portuguese in 1567, the settlement 
grew slowly, and it was not till 1762 that the seat of 
government was transferred here from Bahia, seven 



384 SOUTH AMERICA 

hundred miles further to the north. Now the popula- 
tion, estimated at a million, is in South America ex- 
ceeded by that of Buenos Aires only, and in recent 
years much has been done to improve both the city 
and its port and wharves. Still greater service has 
been rendered by sanitary measures which have not 
only cleared away slums, but have practically ex- 
tinguished yellow fever, and reduced the mortality 
from other tropical diseases. Rio is now a pleasant 
place of residence in winter, and the sea-breeze 
makes the climate agreeable in all but the hottest 
months, during which Europeans find it debilitating. 
Fifty years ago the then Emperor Dom Pedro the 
Second built himself a summer residence among the 
mountains which rise beyond the further end of the 
bay, and this presently became the "hot weather sta- 
tion," as people say in India, for the richer class of 
citizens and for the representatives of foreign countries. 
Now that Rio itself is more healthy, the need for an 
annual migration is less imperative, but the natural 
charm as well as the much cooler air of Petropolis — 
so the place is called — have maintained it as a summer 
resort. It is an excellent centre both for the naturalist 
and for the lover of scenic beauty. 

The railway from Rio, after traversing the low 
and marshy ground along the margin of the bay 
for more than twenty miles, reaches the foot of the 
Organ Mountains, which form a part of the Coast 
Range already referred to. 1 These Organ Mountains 
1 See page 368. 



BRAZIL 385 

(Serra dos Orgaos) rising in a row of granite towers to 
a height of 7300 feet, the ravines between their peaks 
filled with luxuriant forest, make a noble ending 
to the view from Rio along the length of the bay. 
A botanist could spend no more delightful week than 
in rambling among them at a season when the rains 
are not too heavy. The railway climbs the Serra at 
its lowest point, about 2600 feet above sea-level, de- 
scending a little on the other or northeastern side to 
Petropolis. The grade is so steep as to require trains 
to be hauled up by a wire rope. Nothing can surpass 
the beauty of the views which the ascent gives over the 
bay with its islands and all the way southeastward 
to the mountains that surround Rio. 

Petropolis is a pretty little spot, nestling under steep 
hills, its streets well planted and shady, its rows of shops 
which address themselves to the summer visitor re- 
minding one of a Pyrenean or Rhenish bathing place. 
But the charm of its surroundings is beyond that of 
any place in Europe, for in no temperate clime are 
such landscapes with such woods and such colours 
to be found. Here, better even than in the neigh- 
bourhood of Rio, one can explore the glens and penetrate 
the forests on foot, wherever a path can be found to fol- 
low, for to force one's way along without a path, by cut- 
ting openings through the tangle of shrubs and climbers 
with a machete, is a task beyond the powers of the solitary 
walker. It is not so easy as in Europe to get to know the 
mountains, for the pedestrian cannot go where he will. 
The thickness of the wood stops him. He cannot fix upon 
2c 



386 SOUTH AMERICA 

some attractive summit and say he will climb there for a 
view, because access on foot, and, still more, access on 
horseback, is possible only where there exists a regular 
" trail " or well-marked path. Yet it is a genial country, 
fit to be loved, and not on too vast a scale, like the 
Himalayas or the Andes. When one rambles along the 
valleys, new beauties appear as the mountains group 
and regroup themselves with rock peaks springing un- 
expectedly out of the forest, and new waterfalls disclose 
themselves along the course of the brooks, for in this 
land of showers every hollow has its stream. The 
heights are sufficient to give dignity, 1 and the forms 
are endlessly varied, with here and there open pastures 
or slopes of rocky ground rising to a rocky peak, while 
the heat is tempered by the elevation and by the seldom 
failing breeze. 

We learnt still more of the character of the country 
in an excursion over the Leopoldina railway, down 
into the valley of the Parahyba River, and back 
up one of its tributary glens, to the top of the Coast 
Range whence we descended to the coast at Nictheroy 
opposite Rio. In general one does not get the best im- 
pression of any scenery, and perhaps least of forest 
scenery, from a railroad. Here, however, a railroad 
must be turned to account, because roads are few and 
driving difficult. Our train moved slowly and the rains 
had laid the dust. 

This Leopoldina railway (the property of a British 
company, to the kindness of whose managers we were 
1 The tops range from 4500 to 7000 feet. 



BRAZIL 387 

greatly beholden) descends a narrow valley, hemmed 
in by steep mountains whose projecting spurs and 
buttresses turn hither and thither the course of the 
foaming river. Right and left waterfalls leap over the 
cliffs to swell its waters. The slopes are mostly too steep 
for tillage, but here and there a cluster of houses clings to 
the slopes, and round them there are fruit trees and maize 
fields or little gardens. At last the ravine widens and 
we emerge into the broad valley, bordered by lower hills, 
of the Parahyba, one of the chief rivers of the Atlantic 
side of Brazil. Running down it, through a rich coun- 
try, we stopped at a wayside station to take horse 
and ride up to a Fazenda (estate) whose hospitable 
owner had invited us to see his coffee plantations and 
live stock. The house, set on a hill with a pretty 
garden below it and charming views all round, and in- 
habited by a large family of his children and grand- 
children, gave a pleasant impression of Brazilian rural 
life. Here was simplicity with abundance, the beauty of 
groves and flowers, a bountiful Nature, labourers, nearly 
all negroes, who seemed contented and attached to their 
kindly master. A band of coloured people turned out 
to greet us and played the national air of Britain. 
The plantation and stock farms are managed by 
the owner and his son, who take pleasure in hav- 
ing everything done in the best way. We saw 
the process, quite an elaborate one, and carried on by 
machinery, of washing and drying the coffee-beans, 
sorting them out by size and quality, separating the 
husks and membranous coverings from the beans before 



388 SOUTH AMERICA 

they are fit to be packed and shipped. Coffee is an ex- 
hausting crop. Fresh land must be taken in from 
time to time and the old land allowed to rest; and 
we were to see next day many tracts where it used to be 
cultivated, which have now been abandoned to forest be- 
cause the soil had ceased to repay tillage. A large piece 
of ground was ready to be planted with young coffee- 
plants, and we were asked to inaugurate it by planting 
the first trees, which was done to the accompaniment 
of rockets let off by the negroes in the full afternoon 
sunlight. The love of fireworks, carried by the peoples 
of southern Europe to the New World, reaches its 
acme among their coloured dependants. 

Leaving with regret this idyllic home, we sped all 
too quickly down the vale of the Parahyba. Everyone 
knows that there is nothing more beautiful than the 
views one gets in following a river. But here we felt 
as if we had not known before how beautiful a 
valley can be till this Brazilian one was seen in its 
warm light, with the heavy shadows of tropic clouds 
falling upon woods and pastures, the broad stream 
now sparkling over the shallows, now reflecting the 
clouds from its placid bosom. The nearer ridges that 
fell softly on either side were crowned with villages 
clustering round white church spires ; other ridges rose 
one behind another to the west, their outlines fading 
in the haze of distance. Not often in the tropics does 
one get the openness and the mingling of cornfields and 
meadows with forest which make the charm of south 
European scenery. Here the landscape had that 



BRAZIL 389 

Italian quality one finds in Claude and in the back- 
grounds of Titian but bathed in the intenser light of a 
Brazilian sun. In Brazil, as in Mexico, scenery that is 
both splendid and romantic stands awaiting the painter 
who is worthy to place it on canvas. 

At last, turning away from the Parahyba, which the 
main line of railway follows to the sea, we mounted 
by a branch up a lateral valley, passed through great 
stretches of rough pasture land into the higher region 
of thick woods, and halted for the night in the midst 
of a thunderstorm which pealed and growled and 
flashed all night long, as often happens in these latitudes 
where one bank of clouds comes up after another to re- 
new the discharges. Next morning the line, after keep- 
ing along the heights for some miles, descended through 
a forest more wonderful in its exuberance than any we 
had yet seen. From the summit we looked over a 
wilderness of deep valleys, the waving green of their 
tree-tops seamed with the white flash of waterfalls, with 
many ranges and peaks rising in the far distance, few of 
whose tops any European foot had pressed, for it is only 
the bottoms of the valleys that are inhabited. The 
views were all the more beautiful because the precipices 
on the hillsides beneath which we passed were dripping 
with rivulets from last night's rain, and cascades leapt 
over a succession of rock ledges and hurried in foaming 
channels down the bottoms of the glens. 

In the hollow of the valley lies a quiet little town called 
Novo Friburgo, because first inhabited by a Swiss colony 
brought here many years ago to grow coffee. These 



390 SOUTH AMERICA 

Brazilian villages are loosely built, the houses scattered 
along wide streets, among spreading trees, and this one 
had retained something of the trimness of the industri- 
ous people who first settled it. Many of the coffee 
plantations of forty or even thirty years ago have been 
abandoned, and their sites are now practically undistin- 
guishable from the rest of the forest. How long it will 
take for the land to recover its pristine vigour is not 
yet known, and there is still so much virgin land waiting 
to be planted that the question is of more importance 
to the individual owner than to the nation at large. 

From this smiling vale the line climbs another 
high ridge and then descends once more through a 
long valley to the level land that lies behind the bay of 
Rio, coming out at last in the town of Nictheroy oppo- 
site the city. 

This long run through the mountains on the top of 
the ridges and down along the terraces cut out in their 
sides, whence one can look over great spaces of woodland, 
completed the impressions of the forest which our excur- 
sions round Rio and Petropolis had given. Regarded as 
a piece of Nature's work, these Brazilian forests are more 
striking than those of the eastern Himalayas or of the 
Nilghiri Hills in India, more striking even than that 
beautiful little forest at Hilo in Hawaii, which no one 
who has visited that extraordinary island can ever 
forget. It is not that these Brazilian trees are very 
lofty. I was told that further north there are places 
where the great trunks reach two hundred feet, but here 
none seemed to exceed, and not very many to reach, 



BRAZIL 391 

one hundred. Thus, as respects either height or girth 
or general stateliness of aspect, these trees of the 
Serra do Mar are not to be compared either to the so- 
called "Big Trees" of California 1 or to the red woods 
of the Pacific Coast Range, 2 nor do they equal the 
forests of the Cascade Range above Puget Sound, 
where many of the Douglas firs and the so-called 
"cedars" approach, and some are said to exceed, 
three hundred feet. But they have a marvellous 
variety and richness of colour both in flowers and 
leaves. Very few — in this part I could see none — are 
coniferous, but very many are evergreen, changing their 
leaves not all at the same time, like the deciduous trees 
of temperate countries, but each tree at its own time, so 
that there are always some with fresh leaves coming as 
the others are beginning to go. The variety of tints 
is endless, from the dark glossy green of many a forest 
tree to the light green of the bamboos. Some leaves 
have white undersurfaces, which when turned up by the 
wind are bright enough to give the effect of flowers ; and 
one tree, frequent in these mountains, has a group of 
what seem white bracts round the corymb at the end of 
its flower-shoots. Still more varied and still more bril- 
liant are the flowers. These are seen best from above 
because it is the highest boughs touched by the sun that 
burst forth into the most abundant blossoms. Though 
we were too early in the hot season to see the blossom- 
bearing trees at their best, the wealth of colour was de- 

1 Sequoia gigantea of the Mariposa and Calaveras groves. 
a Sequoia sempervirens. 



392 SOUTH AMERICA 

lightful even in November. Yellow and white were 
perhaps the most frequent, but there were also bright 
pinks and purples and violets. Palms rising here and 
there often high above the rest gave a variety of tint 
and form, while the space between the trunks was filled 
by tree-ferns rising to twenty feet and by a bewil- 
dering profusion of climbing and hanging and parasitic 
plants, many of them girdling the boughs with flowers. 
There were far more than anybody could give me 
names for, and as I had no means of ascertaining the 
scientific names, it would not serve the reader to give 
the popular Portuguese ones, especially as I found that 
the same name was sometimes applied to quite different 
plants because their colour was similar. 

It is in a region like this that one begins to 
realize the amazing energy of nature. In the Andes 
we had seen the power of what are called the inanimate 
forces acting from beneath to shake the earth and 
break through its solid crust. There heat, acting 
upon water, has produced volcanic explosions and 
piled up gigantic cones like Misti and Tupungato, 
and has destroyed by earthquakes cities like Valpa- 
raiso or Mendoza. Here heat and water are again 
the force and the matter on which the force works ; 
but here it is through life that they act. Every inch of 
ground is covered with some living and growing thing. 
While the tall stems push upward to overtop their 
fellows and let their highest shoots put forth flowers 
under the sunlight, climbing plants slender as a vine- 
shoot or stout as a liana embrace the trunk and mount 



BRAZIL 393 

along the branches and hang in swinging festoons from 
tree to tree. The fallen trurks are covered thick with 
ferns and mosses. Orchids and many another parasite 
root themselves in the living stem, and make it gay, 
to its ultimate undoing, with blossoms not its own. 
Even the bare faces of gneiss rock, too steep for any soil 
to rest upon, support a plant with a thick whorl of succu- 
lent leaves that is somehow able to find sustenance from 
air and moisture only, its roots anchored into some slight 
roughness of the rock. When a patch of wood has been 
cut down to the very ground, five years suffice to cover 
the soil again with a growth of trees and shrubs so 
rank that the spot can scarcely be distinguished from 
the uncut forest all round. But this swift activity 
of life is hardly more wonderful than is the variety of 
forms. Each of the great forests of Europe and North 
America consists of a few species of trees. In the New 
Forest in England, most beautiful of all, in one place 
chiefly beeches are found, in another chiefly oaks, 
mixed, perhaps, with some birches and white thorns. 
The woods of Maine and New Hampshire are composed 
of maples and birches, white pines and hemlocks and 
spruces, with now and then some less frequent tree. In 
the majestic forests of the Pacific coast there are seldom 
more than three or four of the larger species present 
in any quantity and this is generally true also of the 
Eucalyptus forests of Australia. But on this Brazilian 
coast the diversity is endless. Those who have 
traversed the Amazonian forests have made the same 
remark. There as here you may find within a radius of 



394 SOUTH AMERICA 

eighty yards, forty kinds of trees growing side by side, 
species belonging to different families with myriad 
shapes and hues of leaf and flower. Not content with 
the abundance of its production, this creative energy of 
nature insists on expressing itself also in an endless 
variety of forms. Do any principles which naturalists 
have yet discovered quite explain such a marvellous 
diversity where the conditions are the same ? 

After the doctrine of the Struggle for Life had been once 
propounded by two great naturalists who had seen, one 
of them South America, and the other, the tropical 
islands of the Further East, men soon learnt to recognize 
and observe the working of the principle in every part 
of the earth until in the arid desert or the freezing north 
a land was reached where life itself was extinct. But 
it is in Brazil that the principle is seen in the fulness 
of its potency. Here, where life is so profuse, so multi- 
form, so incessantly surging around like the waves of a 
restless sea, this law of nature's action seems to speak 
from every rustling leaf, and the forest proclaims it with 
a thousand voices. 

Rambling round Rio, and noting the physical char- 
acteristics of the ground it occupies, the rocky hills and the 
promontories and the islands, the traveller is reminded 
of the historic cities of Greece and Italy and naturally asks 
himself : Supposing Rio to have been one of those cities, 
where would the Acropolis have been, and where 
would the citizens have met in their assembly before 
they rushed to attack a tyrant, and to what sea-girt for- 
tress would a ruler have sent his captives by water 



BRAZIL 395 

as the East Roman emperors seized their enemies and 
sent them into exile from the Bosphorus? Then, re- 
membering that few streets or hills in Rio have any asso- 
ciations with the past, he wonders whether such asso- 
ciations will come into being in the future, and whether 
insurrections and civic conflicts may ever render some of 
these spots famous. In old cities like Florence and Paris 
and Edinburgh historic memories make a great part of 
the interest of the place. How much of English history 
connects itself with the Tower of London and with West- 
minster Hall! It so happened that during our stay in 
Rio there befell an incident which shewed that the 
smooth surface of things may, even in our own days, be 
troubled by explosive passions, an incident which re- 
vealed a new kind of danger to which in times of 
domestic strife modern engines of warfare may subject 
a maritime town. 

On the day when we were to embark for Bahia and 
Europe, we started early in the morning from Petrop- 
olis to come down by train to Rio, and heard at the 
station rumours of a revolution, confused rumours, 
for no one could say from whom the revolution, if there 
was one, proceeded or against whom it was directed. 
When we reached Rio, things cleared up a little. It was 
not a political revolution nor a military pronunciamento, 
but a marine mutiny. The crews, almost entirely 
negroes, of the two great Dreadnought battleships 
which the Brazilian government had recently ordered 
and purchased from an English firm of shipbuilders, 
and which had shortly before arrived in the harbour, 



396 SOUTH AMERICA 

had revolted during the night. The captain of one 
of the vessels, the Minas Geraes, had been murdered 
by his crew as he stepped on board upon his return from 
dining on a French ship. The story ran that he had 
been first pierced by bayonets and then hewed in pieces 
with hatchets. Of the other officers some few had been 
killed, the rest put on shore. The only white men left on 
board were some English engineers forcibly detained in 
order to work the engines. The crews of a cruiser and 
two smaller war vessels had joined in the revolt. All the 
ships were in the hands of the crews, who, however, were 
believed to be obeying non-commissioned officers 
of their own colour, and who were led by a negro 
named Joao Candido, 1 a big man of energy and resolu- 
tion, who had shewn his grasp of the situation by 
ordering all the liquor on the Minas Geraes to be 
thrown overboard. The grievances alleged by the 
seamen were overwork, insufficient wages, and the 
frequency of corporal punishments. Rumours were 
busy connecting the names of prominent politicians 
with the outbreak, but so far as could be made out then 
or subsequently there was no foundation for these suspi- 
cions. The mutiny seems to have been the sponta- 
neous act of the crews, who, it was remarked, had just 
arrived from Lisbon, lately the scene of a revolution, 
and might have there caught the infection of rebellion. 
In demanding the redress of their grievances, which 
was, of course, to be accompanied by an amnesty for 
themselves, they had threatened to lay the city in ashes, 

1 John White. 



BRAZIL 397 

enforcing the threat by firing some shots into it (not, 
however, from the heavy guns)* One shot killed two 
children, and several other persons were wounded. 

The aspect of the city was rather less affected than 
might have been expected. Some troops were moving 
about, here cavalry, there infantry. Few carriages or 
motor cars and few women were to be seen. Business 
was slack, and groups of men stood talking at street 
corners, evidently imparting to one another those tales 
and suspicions and guesses at unseen causes with which 
the air was thick. All water traffic from the opposite 
side of the bay had been stopped by the mutineers, who 
had also compelled the submission of one of the forts 
at the entrance. Strolling along to the great Botafogo 
Esplanade under the palms, I found a battery of field 
artillery, their guns pointed at the two battleships, the 
Minas and the Sao Paulo, against which they would, 
of course, have been as useless as paper pellets. There 
the majestic yellow grey monsters lay, fresh from Messrs. 
Armstrong's yard at Newcastle, flying the ensign of 
Brazil, but also flying at the fore the red flag of rebellion. 
So the day wore on, terror abating, but the sense of help- 
lessness increasing. We were lunching at the Ministry 
of Foreign Affairs — it was a small party, for consider- 
ations of safety had kept away the ladies who had been 
invited — when suddenly the heavy boom of the guns 
was heard, and continued at intervals all through the 
repast. When again in the streets, I found that the 
two Dreadnoughts were shelling some torpedo-boats, 
manned by crews still loyal, which had approached 



398 SOUTH AMERICA 

them. The practice was bad, and none of the boats 
was hit, but they prudently scurried off up the bay 
into shallow water where the ironclads could not follow. 
So the hours passed and everybody was still asking, 
" What is to be done ? " "The mutineers, " so men said, 
" can't be starved out, because they have threatened 
to destroy the city if food is refused them, and the 
city is at their mercy. By this threat they have forced 
us to give them water. We cannot blow up the ships 
with torpedoes, first because they have stretched torpedo 
nets round the hulls, and secondly because it would be a 
serious thing to destroy property for which we have paid 
no small part of our annual revenue. Doesn't it look 
as if we should have to submit to the mutineers? 
What else can we do?" Later on the firing recom- 
menced and I mounted to the third story of the British 
Consulate to see what was happening. The ships were 
shelling the naval barracks on the Isla das Cobras in the 
harbour, and the island was replying, and we were near 
enough to see the red flash from the iron lips just before 
the roar was heard. Lying out in the bay was the 
British liner by which we were to sail for Liverpool. 
The lighters that were carrying coal to her had been 
commandeered by the mutineers, but she had just 
enough in her bunkers to get to Bahia. The immedi- 
ate difficulty was for the passengers to reach her across 
the line of fire. At last, however, a boat was sent out 
from shore bearing a flag of truce, and the Sao Paulo 
consented to cease firing and let the passengers get on 
board the British vessel. They were accordingly em- 



BRAZIL 399 

barked in a launch which, flying the Consulate flag, 
crossed unharmed the danger zone. It was the only 
chance, but a sense of relief was visible in every face 
when we stepped on board, for if a negro gunner had 
been smitten by the desire to let fly once more at the 
Isla das Cobras, his ill-aimed shot might very well have 
sent the launch to the bottom. As we steamed slowly 
out to the ocean the magnificent Sao Paulo ran close 
alongside us, and we could see her decks crowded with 
negroes and the red flag still flying. "A study in black 
and red," someone observed. Outside the entrance 
were lying the Minas Geraes and the Bahia, partly to 
be out of harm's way from torpedoes, partly to guard 
the mouth of the bay. In the sober light of a grey 
sunset, the clouds hanging heavy on the Corcovado, 
but the lofty watch-tower of the Pan d'Azucar still 
visible through the gathering shades, we turned north- 
ward, and bade farewell to Rio. Two hours later, 
looking back through a moonless night, we could still 
see the flash, from beneath the horizon, of the search- 
lights which the Minas Geraes was casting on the sea 
all round her to guard against the stealthy approach 
of a loyal torpedo-boat. 

A few days later, at Pernambuco, we heard that 
peace had been restored. The Chambers had voted an 
amnesty with eloquent speeches about the beauty of for- 
giveness, and had promised to redress the grievances of 
the mutineers. Another mutiny broke out afterwards, 
which, after many lives had been lost, was severely 
suppressed, but these later events happened when we 



400 SOUTH AMERICA 

were far away, nearing the coast of Europe, and of them 
I have nothing to tell. 

The coast for some way north from Rio continues 
high, but the steamers keep too far out to permit its 
beauties to be seen. Before one approaches Bahia, 
the mountains have receded, and at that city, though 
picturesque heights are still visible, they lie further back, 
and scarcely figure in the landscape. Still further north, 
towards Pernambuco, and most of the way northwest- 
ward to Para, the coast is much lower. The bay of Bahia 
is singularly beautiful in its vast sweep, as well as in the 
verdure that fringes its inlets, and the glimpses of distant 
sunlit hills. Nor is the city, long the capital of Brazil, 
wanting in interest; for, though none of the buildings 
have much architectural merit, there is a quaint, old- 
fashioned look about the streets and squares, with 
many a house that has stood unchanged since the 
eighteenth century. The upper city runs along the 
edge of a steep bluff, sixty or eighty feet above the lower 
town, which is a single line of street, even more dirty 
than it is picturesque, occupying the narrow strip be- 
tween the harbour and the cliff. Here, far more than 
in Parisianized Rio, one finds the familiar features of a 
Portuguese town reproduced, irregular and narrow 
streets, houses, often high, roofed with red tiles, and 
coloured with all sorts of washes, pink, green, blue, 
and yellow. Sometimes the whole front or side 
of a house is covered with blue or yellowish brown tiles, 
a characteristic of Portuguese cities — it is frequent 
in Oporto and Braga — which has come down from 



BRAZIL 401 

Moorish times. But a still greater contrast between 
this and southern Brazil is found in the population. In 
Sao Paulo there are few negroes, in Rio not very many, 
but here in Bahia all the town seems black. One might 
be in Africa or the West Indies. It is the same in Per- 
nambuco and indeed all the way to the mouth of the 
Amazon. 

Finding this to be a region filled with coloured people 
as Sao Paulo was with white people, and knowing that 
a thousand miles further west one would come into a 
region entirely Indian, one began to realize what a vast 
country Brazil is, big enough to be carved up into six- 
teen countries each as large as France. Were there 
natural boundaries, i.e. such physical features as moun- 
tain ranges or deserts, to divide this immense region 
into sections, the settled parts of Brazil might before 
now have split apart into different political communi- 
ties. As it is, however, there are no such natural divid- 
ing lines, and if the Republic should ever break in 
pieces it will be differences in the character of the pop- 
ulation or some conflict of material interests that will 
bring this about. 

How has it happened that so huge a country has 
fallen to the lot of a people so much too small for it, 
since one can hardly reckon the true Brazilian white 
nation at more than seven millions ? 

What did happen was that the French, English, and 
Dutch, having their hands full in Europe, did not pur- 
sue their attempts to occupy the country with sufficient 
persistence and with adequate forces, and so lost their 

2d 



402 SOUTH AMERICA 

hold on the parts they had seized. Thus it became 
possible for a handful of Portuguese on the Atlantic 
coast to send out small colonizing parties into their un- 
occupied Hinterland, and as there were no civilized in- 
habitants to resist them, to go on acquiring a title to it 
without opposition until they met the outposts of the 
Spanish government who had advanced from the Pacific 
across the Andes just as the Portuguese had advanced 
from the Atlantic. Neither Portuguese nor Spaniards 
had been numerous enough to colonize this interior 
region of the continent, so it remains (save for a few 
trading posts on the rivers) an empty wilderness. 

Nevertheless, though Brazil is physically all one coun- 
try, it contains regions differing in climate, in economic 
resources, and in population. I will try in a few sen- 
tences to indicate the character of each. 

The most northerly part along the frontiers of 
Guiana and also along a good deal of the coast between 
the mouth of the Amazon and Cape St. Roque is the 
least valuable, for large tracts are stony and protracted 
droughts are not uncommon. The extreme north has 
been hardly at all settled. 

The east central part, consisting of the mountain 
ridges and table-lands referred to on page 368, together 
with slopes which descend on all sides from these 
highlands, is a region of great natural resources where 
all tropical crops and fruits can be produced. Most 
of it is healthy, much of it not too hot for white men 
to work and thrive, and the magnificent forests, no 
less than the mines, will make the mountains for many 



BRAZIL 403 

years to come no less a source of wealth than are the 
more level tracts. Its weak point is the want of white 
labour and the inefficiency of black labour. 

This tropical region passes imperceptibly into the 
temperate country which occupies the states of Sao 
Paulo, Parana, Santa Catharina, and Rio Grande, a 
section of the country no less fertile than the last and 
better fitted for European constitutions. Here all sub- 
tropical products can be raised; here also are forests; 
and here, where the land has not yet been brought 
under tillage, there is abundant and excellent pasture 
for all sorts of live stock. As the east central region is 
the land of cotton and sugar, so this southern region is 
the land of coffee and cattle, — ■ coffee in its northerly 
parts, cattle and the cereals in its southern. 

There remain the vast spaces of the west and north- 
west, still so imperfectly explored that it is hard to 
estimate their economic value. To the Amazonian 
forests, the Selvas, I shall return in another chapter. 1 
They are the land of another great Brazilian staple — 
rubber. Most parts of the region where Brazil adjoins 
Bolivia, a vast level or slightly undulating country, 
partly grassy, partly covered with wood or scrub, is 
believed to be available either for cultivation or for 
ranching. At present access is difficult, and markets 
are far away, but when the districts of Brazil, Uruguay, 
and Argentina that lie between this region and the coast 
have been more fully settled, its turn will come. 

Taking Brazil as a whole, no great country in the 
1 Chapter XVI. 



404 SOUTH AMERICA 

world owned by a European race possesses so 
large a proportion of land available for the support 
of human life and productive industry. In the United 
States there are deserts, and of the gigantic Russian 
Empire much is desert, and much is frozen waste. But 
on the Portuguese of Brazil nature has bestowed noth- 
ing for which man cannot find a use. Such a possession 
as this was far more than enough to compensate the 
little kingdom for the loss of the empire which it began 
in the sixteenth century to build up in India, before the 
evil days came after the death of King Sebastian. 

The material prosperity of a country, however, de- 
pends less on its natural resources than on the quality 
of the labour applied to its development and on the 
intelligence that directs the labour. In these respects 
Brazil has been less fortunate. When the Portuguese 
first settled the coast lands, they forced the Indian abo- 
rigines to work for them, and in many places destroyed 
by their severities the bulk of the native population. 
Negroes began to be imported about a.d. 1600, but not in 
great numbers until the discovery of diamond and other 
mines in the inland country created a sudden demand 
for labour. After that, there came a large importation 
of slaves, for agricultural as well as for mining purposes, 
from all the Portuguese dominions of Africa, and from the 
Congo regions ; and this went on, though latterly much 
reduced, down to our own time. Between 1825 and 1850 
it is said that 1,250,000 slaves were landed, and cargoes 
came in even later. Thus the working population of 
the tropical region, including the coast towns, became 



BRAZIL 405 

largely, and in the north, predominantly negro. Slavery 
was abolished by successive stages, the last of which was 
reached in 1888. For a time the plantation culture 
was disorganized, but most of the freedmen ultimately 
returned to work. It is by their labour that sugar and 
cotton are raised to-day, though they take life very 
easily, and often content themselves with just so much 
exertion on just so many days a week as is needed to 
provide them with food and the other scanty necessaries 
of their life. Here, as elsewhere, the race is lighthearted 
and thoughtless, caring little for the future, loving 
amusement in its most childish forms. It is kindly and 
submissive, but dangerously excitable, and quickly 
demoralized by drink. The planters find it hard to count 
on their work people, who stay away if they feel more 
than usually lazy, and will, if displeased, transfer 
themselves to another planter, who, in the general 
scarcity of labour, is glad to have them. Many children 
are born to them, but many die, especially in infancy, 
so that, taking the country as a whole, they do not seem 
to increase faster than the other sections of the popu- 
lation. 

Such are the cotton and sugar regions: now let us 
turn to those southerly states of the republic, whose 
staples are coffee and cattle and cereals. In them, and 
especially in Sao Paulo and Rio Grande, the conditions 
are altogether different. The number of negroes was 
never large there, and it does not grow. Owing to the 
elevation of the ground and to the less powerful sun, the 
heat is not excessive in either state, and European im- 



406 SOUTH AMERICA 

migrants can work and thrive and be happy. So 
Europeans have flocked hither. Between 1843 and 
1859 about twenty thousand came from Germany to 
Rio Grande do Sul, and there are now, it is said, about 
two hundred thousand, forming a compact community 
which preserves its national habits and manages its 
own affairs with little interference by the central govern- 
ment. It is, in fact, disposed to resent any such inter- 
ference and to "run things" in its own solid German 
way. Even larger is the number of Italians who in 
more recent years have entered these southern states. 
The labour on the great coffee estates of Sao Paulo is 
almost entirely Italian ; and in Rio Grande they have 
become well-to-do peasant proprietors, living in less 
comfort than their German neighbours, but working 
just as steadily. This better quality of population has 
largely gone to making the southern states the most 
progressive part of Brazil. Should the Italians and the 
native Brazilians of the south, who have far less negro 
blood than those of the middle states, continue to 
spread themselves out as settlers over the still thinly 
peopled southwestern districts, they will probably 
give prosperity to that region also. Cattle ranching 
is in the south carried on by Gauchos much like those 
of Uruguay or Argentina. They are said to have 
communicated their love of horses to the Germans and 
Italians, so that on holidays even the women of those 
races appear on horseback in a way that would startle 
their peasant cousins left at home in Swabia or Lom- 
bardy. 



BRAZIL 407 

The foreign element in Brazil is more important by- 
its energy and industry than by its numbers, for it 
probably little exceeds a million all told, and the total 
population of the republic may approach nineteen or 
twenty millions. In 1910 about 88,000 immigrants 
entered, most of them Italians, and the rest Portuguese, 
Spaniards, and Syrians, these last mostly travelling 
peddlers, or small dealers who establish themselves in 
the towns. The afflux of Syrians that has found its 
way to South America and the West Indies during the 
last few years is a new and curious feature in the cur- 
rents of ethnic movement that mark our time. 

But what of the Brazilian people itself? The influ- 
ences that tend to make it vary from its original type 
are counterworked by the steady immigration from 
Portugal, and from Spain also, for though any sort of 
Spaniard (except a Gallego) differs materially from a 
Portuguese, the two races differ much less from one 
another than either does from any other European stock. 
The Brazilian is primarily a Portuguese in the outlines 
of his mind and character. He has, however, been mod- 
ified by intermixture with two other races. The first of 
these is the native Indian. The settlers both in Sao 
Paulo and along the northeastern coast, while they killed 
most of the Indian men either in fight or by working 
them to death as slaves, intermarried freely with Indian 
women. The offspring were called Mamelucos, an 
Eastern term which it is odd to find here, and which 
is now beginning to pass out of use. In the south this 
mixed race as well as the pure Indian race has been 



408 SOUTH AMERICA 

now absorbed into the rest of the population. 1 You 
would as soon expect to see a Pawnee in Philadelphia 
as an Indian in Santos. In the north the half-breed 
is generally called a Caboclo, a name originally given 
to the tame native Indian, as opposed to the wild 
Indio bravo; and in that region, a large part of the 
agricultural population is of this mixed stock. 

The second modifying influence is that of the imported 
Africans. When the first slave ships disgorged their 
cargoes on the Atlantic coast, the aborigines of those 
districts had already been either killed off or merged 
in the Portuguese population, so that the mingling of 
Indian and negro blood which is supposed to produce 
an especially undesirable class of citizens was compara- 
tively small. The intermarriage of blacks and whites 
has, however, gone on apace, and the negroes consti- 
tute a large, the mulattoes and quadroons a still larger, 
percentage of the population. Some observers hold 
that the coloured people, taken all together, equal or 
outnumber the whites. The intermixture continues, 
for here, as in Portuguese East Africa, no sentiment 
of race repulsion opposes it. 2 Any figures that might 
be given would be quite conjectural; for the line be- 

1 How many Indians there are nobody knows, but the common 
(probably exaggerated) estimate puts them at nearly 2,000,000, half 
of these pagans in the Amazonian forests, while the mixed race is 
calculated at 1,700,000. 

2 Sir H. H. Johnson {The Negro in the New World) conjectures 
the pure blacks at about 2,720,000 and the mulattoes and quadroons 
at about 5,600,000. The rest of the population, that which may be 
described as white because it bears no conspicuous marks of any in- 



BRAZIL 409 

tween the mixed black and white and the white can- 
not be drawn with any approach to accuracy. Even 
in the United States, where conditions permit more 
careful discrimination, no one can tell what is the per- 
centage of mulattoes to the total coloured population, 
nor how many quadroons and octoroons there are to 
be found among those classed as whites, for many people 
who have some negro blood succeed in concealing its 
presence, while others are classed as coloured who in 
Europe would pass as white. Much more difficult is it 
to tell in Brazil who is to be deemed a person of colour. 
How far the differences between the Brazilian and 
the Portuguese of to-day are due to racial admixture, 
and how far to the conditions of colonial life and a new 
physical environment, is a matter on which one might 
speculate for ever and come no nearer to a conclusion. 
The descendants of Englishmen who were living in 
Massachusetts and Virginia in 1840 before immigration 
from Continental Europe had begun to affect the 
English stock shewed already marked differences from 
the Englishmen of old England, and it is impossible to 
tell how far the changes that have passed on the people 
of the United States since then are due to the influx of 
new immigrants from Europe, how far to other causes. 
The Brazilian is still more of a Portuguese than he is of 
any other type. His ideas and tastes, his ways of life, 



fusion of color, may approach 8,000,000. The Indians and half-breeds 
(Indian and white) would make up the rest of the non-European 
population. Of the pure blacks, from 20,000 to 30,000, living on the 
northeast coast, are either Mussulmans or heathen fetichists. 



410 SOUTH AMERICA 

his alternations of listlessness and activity, his kindly 
good nature, his susceptibility to emotions and to a 
rhetoric that can rouse emotion, belong to the country 
whence he came. 

Brazil was the latest country in the American con- 
tinent to become a republic. This befell in 1888. 
In 1807, when the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte 
entered Portugal, the then reigning king, John, of the 
house of Braganza, crossed the Atlantic and reigned at 
Rio till the expulsion of the French enabled him to 
resume his European throne. In 1822 the people had 
become discontented under Portuguese misgovernment. 
Republican ideas, stimulated by the destruction of Span- 
ish power that was proceeding on the Pacific coasts, 
were in the air, and the Regent, Dom Pedro, son of King 
John, proclaimed the independence of Brazil which was, 
after some fighting, conceded by the mother country 
in 1825. His action probably saved monarchical 
institutions, and when he abdicated in 1831, disgusted 
with the difficulties that surrounded him, and with 
the unpopularity to which his own faults had ex- 
posed him, he was succeeded by his son, who ruled 
as the Emperor Pedro the Second. This amiable 
and enlightened prince, a lover of natural science as 
well as of art and letters, devoted himself chiefly to 
European travel and to the economic and educa- 
tional improvement of his country, interfering very 
little with politics. A military conspiracy and the 
resentment of the planters at the sudden abolition of 
slavery brought about the revolution of 1888, in which 



BRAZIL 411 

a republic was proclaimed and the Emperor shipped 
off to Europe. In 1891 a congress met and enacted 
a federal constitution modelled on that of the United 
States. The immense size of the country and its want 
of homogeneity suggested a federal system, the basis 
for which already existed in the legislative assemblies 
of the provinces. Since then Brazil has had its 
full share of armed risings and civil wars. 

At first the states were allowed the full exercise of 
the large functions which the Constitution allotted to 
them, including the raising of revenue by duties on 
exports and the maintenance of a police force which 
in some states was undistinguishable from an army. 
Presently attempts were made to draw the reins 
tighter, and these attempts have continued till now. 
The national government has at its disposal the im- 
portant field of financial and tariff legislation, the con- 
trol of army and navy, and the opportunities of helping 
needy or slothful states by grants of money or by the 
execution of public works. Through the use of these 
powers it has latterly endeavoured to exert over the 
states a greater control than some of them seem will- 
ing to accept. Nor is this the only difficulty. While 
some of the states, and especially the southern, have an 
intelligent and energetic population, others remain far 
behind, their citizens too ignorant and lazy, or too un- 
stable and emotional, to be fit for self-government. 
Universal suffrage in districts where the majority of the 
voters are illiterate persons of colour suggests, if it does 
not justify, extra-legal methods of handling elections. 



412 SOUTH AMERICA 

One illegality breeds another, and there is perpetuated 
a distrust of authority and a resort to violence. As one 
of the most recent and brilliant of European travellers * 
observes, in a passage which conveys his admiration for 
the attractive qualities he finds in the Brazilians, "The 
Constitution enjoys a chiefly theoretic authority. . . . 
There is a lack of balance between the states which have 
already a highly perfected civilization and the districts 
which in theory are on a footing of equality, but whose 
black or Indian population can only permit of a nomi- 
nal democracy stained by those irresponsible outbursts 
which characterize primitive humanity. " That the au- 
thority of a constitution should be " theoretic rather than 
practical " must be expected where " a democracy is nom- 
inal"; for if institutions the working of which requires 
intelligence and public spirit are forced on Indians and 
negroes, their failure is inevitable. 

In the Brazilian politics of to-day there are many 
factions, but no organized parties nor any definite prin- 
ciples or policies advocated by any group or groups of 
men. Federal issues are crossed and warped by state 
issues, state issues confused by federal issues, and both 
sets of issues turn rather on persons than on general 
doctrines or specific practical proposals. One source 
of dissension is, however, absent, — that struggle of the 
church and clericalism against the principles of reli- 
gious equality which has distracted the Spanish-Ameri- 
can republics. In Brazil the separation of church 
and state is complete, and though the diplomatic 

1 M. Georges Clemenceau in his South America of To-day. 



BRAZIL 413 

corps enjoys the presence of a papal Nuncio as one 
of its members, this adherence to tradition has no 
present political significance. Here, moreover, as in 
Argentina and Uruguay, the church and religion seem to 
have little influence upon the thought or the conduct of 
laymen. The absence or the fluidity of parties makes the 
executive stronger than the legislature both in national 
and state politics. There are many men of talent, espe- 
cially oratorical talent, and many men of force, but not 
enough who shew constructive power and the grasp of 
mind needed to handle the enormous economic problems 
which a country so vast, so rich, and so various presents. 
Among the economic issues of to-day may be reck- 
oned that of protection, as against free trade. Bra- 
zilian policy is at present highly protectionist, and 
does not hesitate, when some powerful interest asks 
for further help, to double or more than double 
whatever protective duty it finds existing. The chief 
social questions are those relating to the extension 
of education and the enactment of better labour 
laws for the benefit of children and the security 
of workpeople. The chief constitutional question is the 
relations of the national and the state governments. Eu- 
ropean critics complain that upon none of these does any 
legislative group seem to put forward any definite and 
consistent policy. Yet such critics must be reminded 
that the country has been a republic only since 1891, and 
free from the taint of slavery only since 1888, and that 
her peace has been since those years frequently dis- 
turbed. It is too soon to be despondent. 



414 SOUTH AMERICA 

Brazilian society seems to a passing observer to 
be in a state of transition, and may not for some time 
to come succeed in reconciling the contrasts between 
the old and the new, and between theory and prac- 
tice, which it now displays. The old system was 
aristocratic not only because a number of respected 
families surrounding the imperial court enjoyed a pre- 
eminence of rank, but also because a newer class of rich 
men, chiefly landowners, had grown up. The aristoc- 
racy of rank is now almost gone, but the aristocracy of 
wealth remains and is in control of public affairs. In 
most parts of the country, it stands far above the labour- 
ing population, with little of a middle class between. 
Democratic principles have been proclaimed in the 
broadest terms, but thinking men see, and even un- 
thinking men cannot but dimly feel, that no govern- 
ment, however good its intentions, can apply such prin- 
ciples in a country where seven-eighths of the people are 
ignorant, and half of them belong to backward races, un- 
fit to exercise political rights. The conditions here noted 
may be thought to resemble those of the southern states 
in the North American Union. But there are two 
conspicuous differences. In Brazil no social " colour 
line" is sharply drawn, and the fusion of whites and 
blacks by intermarriage goes steadily on. In Brazil 
the pure white element, though it preponderates in 
the temperate districts of the south, is less than half 
of the whole nation, whereas in the United States it is 
eight-ninths. Yet in the southern United States nearly 
all the coloured population has been disfranchised and 



BRAZIL 415 

all declarations of democratic principles are understood 
to be subject to the now fundamental dogma that white 
supremacy must be absolutely assured. 

Though the financial stability of Brazil is said to be 
hardly equal to that which Argentina was enjoying in 
1910, and though the growth of national and individual 
wealth has been less rapid, there is a sense of abundance, 
and the upper classes live in an easy open-handed way. 
Slaveholding produces extravagant habits, especially 
among plantation owners, for what is the use of looking 
after the details of expenditure when one has thriftless 
labourers, whose carelessness infects all who are set 
over them? Like their Portuguese ancestors, the 
Brazilians are genial and hospitable, and they have 
the example and the excuse of a bounteous Nature 
around them. They seem less addicted to horse-racing 
and betting than are the Argentines and Chileans, but 
the gambling instinct finds plenty of opportunities in 
the fluctuations of exchange, as well as in the rapid 
changes of the produce markets. 

The Brazilian is primarily a man of the country, not 
of the city. Rio, large as it is, is a less potent factor 
than Buenos Aires is in Argentina, or Santiago in Chile. 
The landowner loves his rural life, as did the Virginian 
planter in North America before the Civil War, and 
fives on the fazenda in a sort of semi-feudal patri- 
archal way, often with grown-up sons and daughters 
around him. Estates (except in the extreme south) 
are extensive; near neighbours are few; families are 
often large; the plantation is a sort of little princi- 



416 SOUTH AMERICA 

pality, and its owner with his fellow-proprietors is 
allowed, despite all democratic theory, to direct the 
politics of the district just as in England, eighty 
years ago, the county families used to control local 
affairs and guide the choice of representatives in 
Parliament. 

I have observed that the Brazilian, though modified 
in some parts of the country by Indian or negro blood, is 
primarily a Portuguese. Now the Portuguese, a people 
attractive to those who live among them, have also had a 
striking history. They are a spirited people, an adven- 
turous people, a poetical people. For more than a cen- 
tury, when they were exploring the oceans and founding 
a dominion in India, they played a great part in the 
world, and though they have never quite recovered 
the position, wonderful for so small a country, which 
they then held, and have produced no later poet equal 
to Camoens, men of practical force and men of intel- 
lectual brilliance have not been wanting. Neither 
are they wanting in Brazil. A love of polite letters 
is common among the upper classes, and the power 
of writing good verse is not rare. The language has 
retained those qualities which it shewed in the Lusiads, 
and the possession of that great poem has helped 
to maintain the taste and talent of the nation. There 
are admirable speakers, subtle and ingenious lawyers, 
astute politicians, administrators whose gifts are ap- 
proved by such feats as the extinction of yellow fever 
in Rio and Santos. The late Baron do Rio Branco was a 
statesman who would have been remarkable in any coun- 



BRAZIL 417 

try. Yet it is strange to find that, both here and in other 
parts of South America, men of undoubted talent are 
often beguiled by phrases, and seem to prefer words to 
facts. Between the national vanities and self-glorifying 
habits of different nations, there is not much to choose, 
but in countries like England and the United States, 
the rhetoric of after-dinner speeches is known clearly 
and consciously by the more capable among the speak- 
ers, and almost as distinctly by the bulk of the audience, 
to be mere rhetoric. They are aware of their national 
faults and weaknesses and do not really suppose them- 
selves more gifted or more virtuous than other peoples. 
In Latin America, where eloquence comes by nature 
and seems to become a part of thought itself, the case is 
different. Exuberant imagination takes its hopes or 
predictions for realities, and finds in the gilded clouds 
of fancy a foundation on which to build practical 
policies. Proud of what they call their Democratic 
Idealism, they assume as already existing in their 
fellow-countrymen the virtues which the citizens of a 
free country ought to possess. To keep these unrealized 
ideals floating before one's eyes may be better than to 
have no ideals at all, but for the purposes of actual 
pohtics, the result is the same either way, for that 
which is secured for the principles embodied in the laws 
is what M. C16menceau happily calls "an authority 
chiefly theoretic." Let us, nevertheless, remember that 
although the habit of mistaking words for facts and 
aspirations for achievements aggravates the difficulties 

of working constitutional government in South American 

2e 



418 SOUTH AMERICA 

countries, these difficulties would in any case exist. 
They inhere in the conditions of the countries. It is 
vain to expect a constitution closely modelled on that 
of the United States to work smoothly in Brazil, just 
as it is impossible to expect the British Cabinet and 
Parliamentary system to work smoothly in those small 
nations which have recently been copying it, without 
an incessant and often ludicrous contrast between doc- 
trine and practice. A nation is the child of its own 
past, as Cervantes says that a man is the child of his 
own works. 

The Brazilians, who never forget that they were 
for a time, during the French invasion of Portugal, 
their own mother country, and head of the whole 
Portuguese people, cherish their national literary tra- 
ditions with more warmth than do the Spaniards of 
the New World, and produce quite as much, in the 
way of poetry and belles lettres, as do the writers of 
Portugal. They have a quick susceptibility to ideas, 
like that of Frenchmen or Russians, but have not so far 
made any great contributions to science, either in the 
fields of physical enquiry or in those of economics, 
philology, or history. One can hardly be surprised 
that learning and the abstract side of natural science are 
undervalued in a country which has no university, noth- 
ing more than faculties for teaching the practical subjects 
of law, medicine, engineering, and agriculture. This de- 
ficiency of a taste for and interest in branches of knowl- 
edge not directly practical is the more noticeable, be- 
cause the Brazilians do not strike one as a new people. 



BRAZIL 419 

Less here than in Argentina or Uruguay, has one the 
feeling that the nation is still in the first freshness of 
youth, eagerly setting itself to explore and furnish its 
home and to develop resources the possession of which 
it has just begun to realize. Business and sport are 
not such absorbing topics of conversation here as they 
are in Argentina; there is neither such a display of 
wealth nor such a passion for spending it. Yet one 
doubts whether this freedom from the preoccupations of 
industry and commerce, the latter mainly left to foreign- 
ers, enures to the benefit of public life. Most of those 
who follow politics seem absorbed in personal intrigues. 
Comparatively few shew themselves sensible of the tre- 
mendous problems which the nation has to face, with 
its scattered centres of population to draw together, 
its means of communication to extend, its public credit 
to sustain, its revenues to be scrupulously husbanded 
and applied to useful purposes, above all, its mass of 
negro and Indian population to be educated and civil- 
ized. Nowhere in the world is there a more urgent 
need for a wise constructive statesmanship. 

It is hard to convey the impression with which one 
sees the shores of Brazil sink below the horizon after 
coasting along them for three thousand miles from 
the Uruguayan border to Pernambuco, and coming to 
know something of the boundless wealth which Nature 
has lavished upon man in this vast land. Not even the 
great North American republic has a territory at once 
so large and so productive. What will be its future? 
Is the people worthy of such an inheritance ? 



420 SOUTH AMERICA 

The first thought that rises in the mind of those who 
are possessed, as in this age we all more or less are, by 
the passion for the development of natural resources, 
is a feeling of regret that a West European race, power- 
ful by its numbers and its skill, say the North American 
or German or English, has not, to use the familiar 
phrase, "got the thing in hand." The white part of 
the Brazilian nation — and it is only that part that 
need be considered — seems altogether too small for 
the tasks which the possession of this country imposes. 
" How men from the Mississippi would make things 
hum along the Amazon and the Parana ! " says the 
traveller from the United States. In thirty years, Brazil 
would have fifty millions of inhabitants. Steamers would 
ply upon the rivers, railways would thread the recesses of 
the forests, and this already vast dominion would almost 
inevitably be enlarged at the expense of weaker neigh- 
bours till it reached the foot of the Andes. Second 
or third thoughts suggest a doubt whether such a 
consummation is really in the interests of the world. 
May not territories be developed too quickly ? Might 
it not have been better for the United States if their 
growth had been slower, if their public lands had not 
been so hastily disposed of, if in their eagerness to ob- 
tain the labour they needed they had not drawn in 
a multitude of ignorant immigrants from central and 
southern Europe? With so long a life in prospect as 
men of science grant to our planet, why should we seek 
to open all the mines and cut down all the forests and 
leave nothing in the exploitation of natural resources to 



BRAZIL 421 

succeeding generations ? In the long run doubtless the 
lands, like the tools, will go to those who can use them. 
But it may be well to wait and see what new conditions 
another century brings about for the world; and the 
Latin- American peoples may within that time grow into 
something different from what they now appear to the 
critical eyes of Europe and North America. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 

In a.d. 1808, when Napoleon Bonaparte, the true Lib- 
erator of Spanish America, moved his armies into Spain, 
the dominions of the Spanish Crown stretched south 
eight thousand miles from the bay of San Francisco to the 
Straits of Magellan. The population that was scattered 
thinly over that vast region was mostly native Indian, 
but there may possibly have been a million of pure 
Spanish stock and many times that number of mixed 
Spanish and Indian blood. All except the Indians 
spoke Spanish; all except the wild heathen tribes 
were Roman Catholics, and the white men were ortho- 
dox Catholics, with universal and genuine horror of 
heresy. All who were of pure European or of mixed 
blood followed customs and held ideas generally similar; 
all had been ruled by governors sent from Spain under 
laws and an administrative system drawn up and carried 
out on similar lines. In every region the Roman 
Church was powerful and monasteries abounded. There 
were no sharp local distinctions among this Spanish and 
Indo-Spanish population. Intercolonial trade was in- 
deed forbidden, and permission to travel from one 
colony to another had to be obtained. But as all were 
subjects of one king and members of one Church, there 
was no political separation beyond that which was in- 

422 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 423 

volved in the existence of various local jurisdictions. 
A native of Mexico was not a stranger on the banks 
of the Orinoco or the Parana any more than the Bos- 
tonian Benjamin Franklin had been a stranger when he 
came to settle in Philadelphia. They could hardly be 
said to form one nation, for they had no national 
organization, but they all alike belonged to the same 
Hispano- American nationality. 

In a.d. 1908 there were in the same area, but now be- 
tween the Rio Grande Del Norte and Cape Horn (the 
territories now known as California, Arizona, and New 
Mexico having by this time become annexed to the 
United States) sixteen independent republics, 1 all of which 
had freed themselves from the Spanish Crown between 
1810, when the first risings took place in Mexico 
and Argentina, and 1826, when the flag of Spain was 
finally lowered on the fortress of Callao, the last strong- 
hold on the American mainland of the successor of 
Charles the Fifth. That which had been one widely 
scattered and loosely connected people had become 
divided into many distinct communities, each with its 
own government, its separate historical traditions, its 
local prides and local antagonisms, its more or less 
definite and sharp-cut national consciousness. From 
the amorphous mass of protoplasm, so to speak, of 
1808, each part of which was generally similar to every 

1 Brazil would make a seventeenth, but it was in 1808 a posses- 
sion of Portugal. The three island republics, Cuba, Hayti, and Santo 
Domingo, bring up the total number of independent Latin-American 
states to twenty. 



424 SOUTH AMERICA 

other part, there had emerged sixteen separate organ- 
isms, some markedly different and no two alike, al- 
though those distinctive features which make up na- 
tional character had become much more fully developed 
in some than in others. That is to say, there are now 
instead of one people sixteen new nations. 

But can we describe these sixteen republics as Na- 
tions ? 

What is a Nation ? 

It is dangerous to offer a definition which may not 
correspond to usage, for usage is the only true master 
and interpreter of words ; and usage is in this case loose 
and varying. But it might be not far wide of the mark 
to say that while a nationality is a population held 
together by certain ties, as, for example, language and 
literature, ideas, customs, and traditions, in such wise 
as to feel itself a coherent unity, distinct from other 
populations similarly held together by like ties of 
their own, a Nation is a nationality, or a subdivision 
of a nationality, which has organized itself into a 
political body, either independent or desiring to be 
independent. This description would encounter some 
doubtful cases. The Athenians in antiquity and the 
Florentines in the Middle Ages were hardly nations, 
though they were independent states, for they were 
parts of a wider Greek and Italian people. The Swiss, 
Alemannian Germans to begin with, grew slowly into 
a nation, and were scarcely so to be described before 
a.d. 1648. Now, though they speak three languages 
and spring from at least three nationalities, they 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 425 

are as united a nation as there is in the world. The 
Magyars did not cease to be a nation because their 
constitutional freedom and rights of self-government 
were overthrown in 1849 and not regained till nearly 
twenty years later. Were the thirteen American 
colonies before 1776 a nation, or did they become so in 
that year, or not till the union of all of them was finally 
assured in 1791 ? Tuscany, though independent under 
its local rulers till 1859, was not a nation, and still less 
were the States of the Church. But is Bavaria to-day 
to be deemed a nation ? Ireland and Scotland figure as 
nations in after-dinner speeches on the days of their 
respective saints : are they so at other times also ? and 
if they are, is Wales a nation ? Were the Transvaal 
and the Orange Free State nations before the South 
African war of 1899? They were certainly parts of 
a Dutch South African nationality. If Canada and 
Australia are nations, is the Union of South Africa 
one also? or does the whole British people all over 
the world constitute a nation ? 

Without multiplying doubtful cases, however, the 
description presented above, and any description which 
tries to represent current usage, would recognize the 
fact, that wherever a community has both political in- 
dependence and a distinctive character recognizable in 
its members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a 
nation. Applying such a test to the Spanish-Amer- 
ican republics, some of them, such as Mexico, Ar- 
gentina, and Chile, are undeniably nations, while even 
some at least of the smaller, such as Cuba, Ecuador, 



426 SOUTH AMERICA 

and Paraguay, have attained sufficient individuality 
and consciousness of corporate unity to make them feel 
and act together and desire to preserve their independ- 
ence. 1 If they maintain that consciousness and that 
independence for another fifty years, their nationhood 
will be indisputable. The bud is opening, even if the 
form and colours of the petals are not yet fully visible. 

By what process, then, and through the working of 
what forces did this more or less uniform common sub- 
stance, this raw material for the making of states, which 
a century ago was spread over the vast Spanish colo- 
nial empire, become differentiated into the sixteen na- 
tions that exist to-day ? 

There is nothing in history more interesting than the 
study of the process by which nations are evolved from 
races or tribes. The widest range of phenomena are 
those supplied by the formation of the kingdoms of 
modern Europe through the admixture or contact of 
the peoples comprised in the Roman Empire with 
the barbarian tribes which entered it or received civ- 
ilization from it. The growth of France, Germany, 
Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, and (by contact 
with little mixture) of Poland, Russia, and the Scandi- 
navian states, and in more recent times the creation 
of Greece and Belgium and Rumania and the re-crea- 
tion as nations of Servia and Bulgaria, are all instances 
of the process. But in the case of the greater and older 
nations this process occupied many centuries, and its 

1 Whether the same can be said of some of the Central American 
republics may be doubted. 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 427 

earlier stages are obscure. Here in Spanish America 
it has been going on under the eyes of the civilized 
world in an age when everything is or can be known, and 
it has taken only a hundred years. In all probability, 
nothing like this, no creation of new national entities 
coming about over so large an area in so short a time, 
can ever occur again. The causes which have produced 
these divergences from one type into many, turning the 
colonial Spaniard, who was in essentials much the 
same kind of man wherever he lived, into a Mexican 
or Uruguayan, a Peruvian, Chilean, or Argentine (to 
take a few of the more marked new national forms), are 
as interesting a subject for enquiry and reflection as 
could engage the thoughts of a philosophic historian. 

All I can do here is to suggest some of these causes 
which occur to the mind of one who travels in Spanish 
America. To work the subject out in detail would 
need years of reading as well as many a journey. 
Hitherto few of those who have read have travelled, 
and few of those who have travelled have read. I have 
done so much less of either than the magnitude of the 
subject demands, that I must ask indulgence for even 
throwing out suggestions which are meant to urge 
others, better equipped than myself, to prosecute the 
enquiry. 

The primary factor which determined the territorial 
limits of each republic is to be found in the existence in 
colonial days of certain administrative divisions. The 
Viceroyalties and Captaincies General constituted so 
many governmental areas, the inhabitants of each of 



428 SOUTH AMERICA 

which felt a sort of community among themselves, al- 
though they had no share in the government. In a few 
of these areas there existed what might be called the 
rudiments of a distinctive character belonging to the in- 
habitants of that area and marking them off from those 
who dwell in other divisions. In the larger number of 
areas there was not yet anything of the sort. When 
the insurrections broke out and as the War of Inde- 
pendence proceeded, the dwellers in each Viceroy alty 
or Captaincy General fought for themselves (with more 
or less help from insurgent bands elsewhere), and when 
they set up a revolutionary government, they tried to 
make the old provincial capital the seat of that govern- 
ment, so that in this way the boundaries of the old 
areas tended to remain, and that which had been an 
administrative division passed into a Republic. Yet 
it was still only a body of inhabitants in an area, not a 
nation. What we have to ask is — How did these 
groups of inhabitants occupying each its own territory, 
in only some few of whom did there exist the rudiments 
of a distinctive national character — how did they grow 
into Nations in the proper sense of the word ? 
The aim of this chapter will accordingly be : — 

I. To indicate the main influences which have differ- 
entiated the inhabitants of Spanish America 
into distinct Nations. These influences are 
partly physical, partly racial, partly historical. 
II. To enquire how far the process of differentiation 
has gone in making the people of any, and 
which, of the republics into true Nations, i.e. in 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 429 

giving them both distinctive traits of character 
and a strong national self -consciousness. 
III. To ascertain to what extent there remains among 
the peoples of these republics any common 
Hispano- American sentiment, any sense of kin- 
ship linking them together in spite of political 
separation, possibly even underlying political 
hostility. 

I. Among the causes or influences which have tended 
to differentiation, the first place may be assigned to geo- 
graphical position. Where one part of a nationality 
is cut off from the other parts by the sea, or by deserts, or 
by dense forests, any peculiarities that already belonged 
to it tend to develop further and become intensified, be- 
cause they are not affected by contact from without ; and 
such a part, moreover, being isolated, attains a stronger 
consciousness of itself as a separate social and political 
entity. Two island republics, Cuba and Santo Domingo, 
were thus destined by nature to stand apart from those 
of the mainland as soon as their connection with the 
European sovereign had been broken. The people 
of Chile, severed from Peru by a wide and waterless 
desert, drew farther and farther apart from those of that 
country. The Chileans and the Argentines are divided 
from one another by a lofty mountain range, passable 
at a few points only, and at those points with difficulty, 
so the differences between them, which more frequent in- 
tercourse might have lessened, grew more pronounced. 
Paraguay stands almost alone in her forests, and till 
steamships began to ply on the great Parana, could be 



430 SOUTH AMERICA 

reached from the coast only by a tedious upstream 
voyage or an even more toilsome land journey. 

Not less important is the influence of physical en- 
vironment in modifying both the race itself and the 
economic conditions of its life. In Mexico, for instance, 
the existence of a compact area of fertile soil around 
the lakes on whose shores the semi-civilization of the 
men of Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) arose, 
created in that area a comparatively large population 
of pure Spanish blood and a still larger one of mixed 
blood which ultimately became the core of the Mexi- 
can republic and enabled it not only to hold together 
the outlying territories, but, also, when it got a strong 
ruler, to set up a strong centralized administration. 
Peru is cut up by the lofty and barren Andean ranges 
into a number of valleys, each more or less isolated. 
Some of its cities, like Arequipa, stand in solitary oases 
surrounded by deserts, while the eastern towns are 
severed from the capital by so many ridges and gorges 
that the formation of an active and homogeneous public 
opinion has been retarded. Chile, on the other hand, 
had till recently nearly all her inhabitants gathered 
in a comparatively small cultivable area, favourable to 
the growth of a united people, and similar conditions 
have accelerated the material progress and intensified 
the patriotism of Uruguay. In the vast territories of 
Colombia and Venezuela where, besides three or four 
cities lying far apart, there are only small settlements 
scattered through a region of mountain and forest, po- 
litical cohesion and the sense of national life must needs 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 431 

advance far more slowly than in a level and cultivated 
land like Argentina, covered with a network of rail- 
ways. 

Climate has told for much in compelling the inhabit- 
ants of the colder regions to work hard and enabling 
those of the hotter to take life easily. The tropical 
states have on the whole lagged behind the temperate 
ones, and there is between them a perceptible differ- 
ence in character and habits. In Bolivia the combined 
effect of the low temperature, thin air, extreme dry- 
ness, and poor food has not only made a large part of 
the plateau a sterile desert, but has also checked the ad- 
vance of the aboriginal race, and has confined the popu- 
lation of Spanish origin to a small number of towns 
lying so far away from one another that common politi- 
cal action becomes difficult and social antagonisms re- 
main acute. 

While these physical differences have told upon all 
the divisions of Spanish America, they have been in 
some all the more efficient because they have been fol- 
lowed by economic consequences, and have induced 
certain forms of industrial life. Cattle and the horse 
have determined the habits of the Argentine and Uru- 
guayan. Mining has had more to do with the Peru- 
vian and the Mexican. No one of the nations has taken 
to a sea-faring life except the Chileans. 

Whoever will compare Spanish America with Anglo- 
America (i.e. the United States and Canada) will be 
struck by the far greater differences of physical en- 
vironment between the various parts of the former 



432 SOUTH AMERICA 

and those of the latter, where no section of the country, 
except Florida, Louisiana, and Texas is oppressively 
hot, even in summer, and where no section, till one 
reaches Labrador, suffers from severities of cold and 
wet such as check settlement in the far south of Chile 
and of Argentina. Nature does less to differentiate 
Anglo-American man into varieties than she does in the 
case of Spanish-American man. 

Even more important than the influence of natural 
conditions has been the presence in Spanish America of 
the aboriginal tribes. These differed greatly in intelli- 
gence, courage, and a disposition to industry. In some 
regions they were both numerous and warlike, as in 
Mexico and Chile. In others they were numerous but 
easily conquered, as in the Peruvian highlands and 
Central America and Paraguay. In some they were 
too few to hold their ground, as in central Argentina 
and Uruguay, or so feeble as neither to offer serious 
resistance nor furnish servile labour. This was the case 
in Cuba and on some of the coasts of the Caribbean 
Sea. The differences in intellectual capacity were ex- 
pressed in the degree of progress they had made towards 
civilization ; the Mexicans and the subjects of the Peru- 
vian Incas standing at the top, and the Amazonian 
savages in the east of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru at 
the bottom of the scale. As another chapter treats of 
their present relations to the European part of the popu- 
lation, it is enough to call attention here to the effect of 
the infusion of native blood in differentiating various 
parts of the old colonial population from one another. 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 433 

The volume of that infusion has been greater in some 
regions than in others, and the native blood has been 
unequal in quality. A half-Indian people tends to 
differ — whether for worse or for better is another 
question — from a white people; and a people mixed 
with Indians of a strong race, like the native Mexican, 
differs from one which has received a blend of weaker 
native blood. In persons of mixed race, the white ele- 
ment predominates, but less evidently in physical appear- 
ance than in mental attributes. The mestizos are all 
Christians and more generally educated; they draw their 
ideas and habits from their European rather than their 
native parentage, which, indeed, they prefer to ignore. 

Besides this influence, which we may call physiological, 
we must further note, as a factor producing diversity, 
the social effect which the presence of a native semiservile 
class has upon the character of the ruling element in the 
population. Where such a class supplies labour, the rul- 
ing element generally despises and refuses manual work. 
Where the former is both numerous and ignorant, it 
usually lowers the moral and probably also the intellec- 
tual standard of the European inhabitants. In some 
republics the presence of this class has encouraged civil 
wars and revolutions by furnishing Indian soldiers who 
can be forced to fight and will fight well for causes in 
which they take no interest. It has moreover made 
the provisions of constitutions which confer universal 
suffrage seem hollow shams. 

In some few Spanish-speaking countries, particularly 
along the Caribbean coasts and in some of the mari- 

2f 



434 SOUTH AMERICA 

time towns of Colombia and Peru, the negro, imported 
after the Conquest, has become a race factor, mingling 
with the whites to produce an intermediate breed which 
is usually superior to the pure black, and mingling 
with the Indian to produce one which is deemed to 
have the faults of both parents and the merits of neither. 
But it was only the colony from Portugal which was 
formerly the Empire and is now the republic of Brazil 
that received slaves on a great scale. There are believed 
to be now at least eight millions of blacks and mulattoes 
in that country, probably two-fifths of the whole popu- 
lation. Such Indian blood as was mingled with the 
Portuguese settlers has become scarcely noticeable, ex- 
cept in Para and along the banks of the Amazon. Brazil 
is, however, so different from the Spanish republics in 
other respects that one need not insist on this element 
of diversity. 

From these physical and racial influences I pass on 
to those of a historical order. Chief among these were 
the long-protracted struggle for independence and the 
interminable civil wars that followed its attainment. 
Under the Crown of Spain the collective life both of the 
inhabitants of its dominions as a whole and of each 
section of those inhabitants had been stagnant. In- 
dependence quickened its pulses and accelerated the 
development of such latent forces as existed into new 
forms. The political events of the revolutionary epoch 
and of the ninety years that followed have done 
much not only to create new nations, but also to 
mould them, while they were growing up, into di- 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 435 

verse shapes. In some republics the civil wars lasted 
longer than they did in others, and left the country more 
exhausted and distracted; in others again foreign inter- 
vention had the effect of consolidating the people 
and creating a stronger patriotism than had existed be- 
fore. This was conspicuously the case in Mexico. 
The French invasion and the long struggle which ended 
in the dethronement and death of the unfortunate Maxi- 
milian of Hapsburg determined the fortunes of that 
country, extinguishing the power of the Church, and re- 
newing the nation's confidence in itself which had been 
shattered by the war with the United States. So, too, 
the heroic efforts made by the Uruguayans under Artigas 
to shake off the yoke of Brazil and their subsequent con- 
flict with Argentina, then ruled by the tyrant Rosas, 
left a permanent impress upon their character. In 
most of the Central American states, on the other hand, 
progress in education, in civil order, and in the turn- 
ing to account of natural resources has been arrested 
by their incessant strife with one another as well as by 
internal convulsions. 

The general result of the wars and revolutions which 
make up so much of Spanish-American history has un- 
doubtedly been to differentiate the peoples and build 
up separate nations and strengthen the national con- 
sciousness of the inhabitants of almost every republic. 
Whether that strengthening has been a good thing or 
not, I do not attempt here to enquire. But apart from 
it, the other consequences of so long a period of struggle 
and bloodshed have been deplorable. 



436 SOUTH AMERICA 

Effort and suffering do no doubt test and try a com- 
munity. War, be it civil or foreign, never leaves men 
the same as it found them, though the common assump- 
tion that it makes them either stronger, or wiser in the 
exercise of their strength, is as false as it is dangerous. 
If war, apart from the pure aim and high spirit in and 
for which it conceivably may be, but seldom has been, 
undertaken, ennobles the soul as well as toughens the 
fibre of a nation, what virtues ought it not to have bred 
in these South American countries, where the lance was 
always glittering and the gun-shot always echoing ? 

Of the other formative and stimulative influences 
which the deliverance from Spanish rule might have set 
to work upon the peoples of the republics, of the develop- 
ment of science, art, and letters, and in particular of that 
part of intellectual life which goes deepest down into the 
soul of a people, theology and religious faith, of these 
things as influences in building up a national individ- 
uality, there is little to be said, because disturbed political 
conditions and the backward state of education checked 
all such development. Until the last thirty years it has 
had no fair chance, and in some republics has little even 
now. One may observe, however, that in such progress 
as can be recorded the Church has had scarcely any share. 
Both her claims to authority and her property have been 
at one time or another (though much less in recent 
years) a cause of political conflicts in most republics. 
But the unfavourable conditions referred to have told 
upon the Church itself, not to add that her ministers were 
under Spanish rule and have continued to be both less 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 437 

well instructed and (of course with many exceptions) 
less exemplary in life than the Roman Catholic priest- 
hood of France or Germany or of the United States. 

The recent economic development of some few of these 
countries, and especially the extension of their agricul- 
ture and their mining, have naturally tended to give 
a practical turn to thought and action, fixing men's 
minds on business, on the public improvements which 
wealth makes possible, and on the enjoyments to which 
it invites. If even old and highly cultivated nations, 
like the Germans and the Italians, are felt by them- 
selves and seen by their neighbours to have been some- 
what altered in spirit and aim under new conditions 
of industrial and commercial life, how much more must 
similar conditions tell upon communities intellectually 
younger and, so to speak, more fluid, less "set" in a 
definite mould. These causes have been increasing the 
differences between the more progressive and the more 
backward republics. They have been setting their stamp 
upon Argentina and Chile. A similar change, though 
it affected only a small class, was discernible in Mexico 
during the later years of the supremacy of Porfirio Diaz. 

Immigration from Europe has not yet gone far enough 
to affect the " type " of any South American people, or 
bear a part in the process of national differentiation. It 
may, however, do so in the future, for in countries where 
prosperity has created a large demand for labour, and 
where public order is little disturbed, there begins to be 
an inflow of settlers from abroad. In Mexico and Cuba 
immigration is steady though not large, and is drawn 



438 SOUTH AMERICA 

almost entirely from Spain. In Peru it is small, for the 
Chinese and Japanese who come are too few to affect 
the character of the population. Some Germans entered 
Chile thirty years ago, and constitute a valuable though 
comparatively small element. A far greater number have 
settled in southern Brazil. Uruguay receives a consider- 
able but at present (1912) declining immigration both 
from Italy and from Spain. To Argentina there come not 
only many Spaniards, but a still fuller stream of Italians, 
who now form so large an element that the Argentine of 
the future will be probably one- third Italian in blood. 1 
Into the other Spanish-speaking parts of the New 
World there is at present very little immigration, nor 
are the tropical regions fitted for agricultural settlers 
from Europe. Chinese or Japanese or Indian coolies 
might do better, and there are already plenty of Hindus 
iii British Guiana. Should valuable minerals be dis- 
covered in places where, as in Colombia, Venezuela, and 
northern Brazil, labour is scarce, the temptation to 
introduce Asiatics would be strong. 

II. We have now to enquire what have been the results 
of the process of nation-building. How many, and 
which, of the republics that were once parts of the great 
Spanish dominion have now grown to be true nations ? 
But here a preliminary difficulty meets us. In speak- 
ing of the peoples of these republics, are we to think 
of all their inhabitants, or only of the ruling Hispano- 
American element, excluding the aborigines? Are the 
aborigines, and such collective character as they possess, 

1 See above, Chapter IX. 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 439 

to be taken into account when we seek to determine 
which communities deserve to be called nations, or are 
they rather to be deemed subject tribes standing out- 
side and not sharing in genuine national life? 

Without anticipating what will be said in a later chap- 
ter, it is enough to remark here that from the United 
States frontier at El Paso in latitude 32° north, down to 
the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 23° south) a very large, 
though unascertained and at present unascertainable 
part of the population — possibly a majority — consists 
of Indians, most of whom speak their native languages, 
and some of whom are mere savages. Even those who, 
like the Quichuas and Aymaras of the Andean plateau, 
are in a fashion civilized, lead a life apart, and, though in 
most republics legally citizens, have practically nothing 
to do with the government of the countries they inhabit, 
except as combatants in its foreign or civil wars. In 
Argentina the question scarcely arises, because nearly 
all the population is of European stock, while in Chile 
the Araucanians are practically the only pure Indians 
left. We must, therefore, restrict our view to the two 
other elements, the European and the mixed, these 
forming, for nearly all practical purposes, one body. 
It is of them, not of the Indians, that we have to think 
when we ask how far the inhabitants of each republic 
have advanced into true nationhood. 

For the purpose of determining whether any com- 
munity ought to be deemed a nation, one must dis- 
tinguish two things which are apt to be confounded. 
The one thing is the presence in the community of a dis- 



440 SOUTH AMERICA 

tinctive national character, the other is the presence of 
strong national sentiment. The former consists in the 
possession by the members of the community of certain 
attributes and certain qualities, visible in its collective 
action, which are peculiar to it, and mark it off from 
other communities. The latter is the consciousness of 
political unity, taking shape in the spirit of self-assertion 
against other communities, expressing itself in the effort 
to make good the community's position in the world, 
to push its claims and to defend its rights. The former 
is in practice usually accompanied by the latter; that is to 
say, a community whose members feel themselves to be a 
political entity, with distinctive ideas and traditions of 
their own, naturally desires to prevent itself from being 
overridden or swamped by other communities. The lat- 
ter, however, does not necessarily imply the former. A 
community may have little that is peculiar or distinctive ; 
may have no racial traits of its own, no literature, no 
spezial beliefs or customs, and a history too short to have 
formed traditions. Yet the circumstances of that short 
history, coupled with vanity (collective and individual) 
and a combative spirit, may have created a sensitive 
and inflammable patriotism which makes the com- 
munity feel and act as a Nation, however little there 
may be to distinguish it from surrounding peoples 
beyond the fact that historical accidents have divided 
it from them and started it on a course of its own. In 
this latter set of cases, an observer who studies the 
community may discover nothing that constitutes a 
distinctive national character. Its citizens may seem 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 441 

much the same in ideas and habits as those of the 
other independent branches of the same nationality 
around them. Yet they may be found to hate those 
neighbours of the same speech just as bitterly as races 
that have been secular enemies, like Turkomans and 
Persians, hate one another. 

Applying these tests to the Latin- American republics, 
it will appear that by both tests several of the greatest 
are indisputably nations. Chile and Argentina have 
each of them a distinctive national quality which so 
marks them off from their neighbours that even the 
passing traveller can discern it. They have national 
character as well as national sentiment. So, too, have 
Mexico and Peru. 1 The same thing is true of Uruguay, 
the people of which, originally the same as that of 
Argentina, have developed, in the course of a tempestu- 
ous history, a somewhat different type. Brazil, being 
Portuguese, has always had a character of its own. 
These six republics may all be deemed to be nations 
in the European sense of the word. I have not visited 
Paraguay, but should suppose that in it the numerical 
preponderance of the native Guarani stock brings about 
a result similar to that which an infusion of coloured 
blood has had in Cuba, but more marked. 

In most of the other republics there seems to be much 
less that can be called distinctive of each. Colombians, 

1 Though, no doubt, there is between the inhabitants of southern 
Mexico and their neighbours, the men of Guatemala and Honduras, 
no marked difference, just as there is not much between the men of 
Northern Peru and their neighbours in Ecuador. 



442 SOUTH AMERICA 

Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians inhabit regions generally 
similar, have had a similar history, and have all received 
about an equal infusion of native blood, though in 
each — and especially in Colombia — there are some few 
old Spanish families who have remained unaffected. 
The average citizen of any of these countries is said to 
be but slightly distinguishable from the average citizen of 
either of the other two. 1 The same is the case as regards 
Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. But in each 
and all of these states there is a profusion of militant 
nationalist spirit, which, in Central America, has been 
fostered by frequent wars. Ecuador has been repeatedly 
on the point of taking up arms against Colombia on one 
side and Peru on the other, over disputes about territory. 
So far as national sentiment can make a nation, these 
republics have it to overflowing. Their common 
Hispano-American nationality no more checks aggres- 
sive displays of enmity than a common Tuscan origin 
mitigated the strife of Florence and Siena, or a common 
Bceotian origin the hatred of Thebes and Platsea. 

The republic whose individuality has been most fully 
developed is Chile. Its citizens are seen at first sight 
to be Chileans, just as in Europe we recognize at once 
a member of any of the leading peoples. Most Spanish 
Americans are good fighters, but the Chileans perhaps 
the best ; for they are the children of the most dogged 
of the native races as well as of the most stalwart of 
the Spanish settlers. The same combination of patriot- 

1 However, a North American friend tells me that he can usually 
tell a Venezuelan from a Colombian. 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 443 

ism and pugnacity is seen in the Uruguayans. In 
character as well as in speech, the Argentines are also 
beginning to shew a character different from that of 
the other peoples ; but the mental and moral type, 
as is natural in a country rapidly growing and deluged 
with immigrants, is not yet fully formed. 

It may be asked whether the best evidence of the 
emergence of a genuine and distinctively national life 
ought not to be found in the growth of a national lit- 
erature expressing, in whatever form, the ardour and 
the aspirations of the people. Those who quote the 
age of Queen Elizabeth and the age of Lewis the Four- 
teenth as instances to support the doctrine that eras of 
successful war and growing power herald, or coincide 
with, an epoch of literary creation, may expect to find 
that the incessant strife which has kept hot the blood of 
the citizens in some republics, and the rapid material 
progress of others, promise an era of intellectual produc- 
tion in South America. Of this, however, there has 
been so far no sign. National spirit seems little dis- 
posed to flow in this channel. In the southern republics 
there is plenty of energy, but not much of it is di- 
rected towards art or science or letters. The long and 
fierce conflict of Chile and Peru was marked on both 
sides by much valour and some heroism, but no poem 
like the Araucana followed. In the more backward 
states, incessant strife has hindered instead of stimu- 
lating intellectual as well as economic progress. In the 
prosperous ones, men's minds are bent upon the develop- 
ment of natural resources, and in the very richest, where 



444 SOUTH AMERICA 

there should be most leisure for mental cultivation, 
upon material pleasures and luxuries. 

III. We have still one more question to ask before 
closing this consideration of. the process by which nations 
have been evolved out of the old administrative divisions 
of Spanish America, divisions originally due to the his- 
torical accidents, which had in colonial times placed dif- 
ferent districts under the authority of different officials. 
How far does there exist among the peoples of these 
republics the sense of a common Hispano-American 
nationality ? Do they feel their common Spanish ori- 
gin, together with Spanish literature and the ideas and 
social customs which they share, to be a source of com- 
mon pride and a bond of unity between them, linking 
them together despite political severances and antago- 
nisms? Spaniards had a certain amount of common 
Spanish feeling before Castile and Aragon were united, 
and Italians, so far from ceasing to feel themselves Ital- 
ians during the centuries before 1848, when they were 
cut up into many states, some of them ruled by foreign 
dynasties, were stirred by a more vehement national- 
ism in that year than ever before. Can one, then, for 
any and for what purposes, treat Spanish America as 
being one whole, either intellectually or sentimentally ? 

It has already been observed that to the traveller 
the differences between one republic and another seem 
comparatively slight, not greater than those which he 
would have noted in wandering leisurely through Ger- 
many before 1866 and 1870 when first the North German 
Confederation and then the new German Empire came 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 445 

into being. Not only is the language the same, with 
dialectic variations which are comparatively few when 
one considers the vast area and the large aboriginal ele- 
ment in the population, but manners and social usages 
are similar everywhere, though less polished in the 
wilder parts. 

Similarity goes even deeper, for it is found in ideas 
and in mental habits. A Costa Rican and an Argentine 
differ less than a Texan does from a Vermonter, or a 
Caithness man from a Devonshire man. All remain 
in a sense Spanish; that is, they are much more like 
Spaniards and more like one another than they are like 
Frenchmen or Italians. They are nearer to one another 
than North Americans are to Englishmen. They have 
the broad features of Spanish character and tempera- 
ment, — the love of sonorous phrases, the sensitiveness 
to friendliness or affront, the sense of personal dignity, 
steady courage in war, and the power of patient endur- 
ance. And among men of education and thought the 
basis of intellectual character and the sense of moral 
values seems to be substantially the same. 

Nevertheless, the feeling of a common Hispano- 
American brotherhood is weak. In Old Spain there 
was before and during the sixteenth century a localism 
strong enough to make Catalonians and Castjlians 
and Andalusians care more for their province than 
for Spain, unless, of course, a question of national 
union against the foreigner came in. The sentiment of 
racial fraternity expressed in the saying that " blood is 
thicker than water " is easily suspended or even over- 



446 SOUTH AMERICA 

ridden and for the time extinguished by political bitter- 
ness. The Thebans, according to the story, fined their 
great poet because he had consecrated two splendid 
lines to the praise of Athens. Not even the closest liter- 
ary and commercial intercourse and the pride of an an- 
cient and glorious stock prevented the people of New 
England from hating those of old England for more than 
a generation after the War of 1812. Among the Spanish 
Americans literature and historical traditions have not 
been forces making for cohesion, for there has been, in 
most of the republics, little literary production, and their 
traditions seldom go back further than the revolution- 
ary war. 

Were there then no memories of Spanish greatness ? 
These may have had some power in colonial days while 
the struggle of Spain and Catholicism against England 
and Holland was at its height. But in later times the 
preference shewn by the viceroys to persons sent out 
from the mother country, and the habit of reserving 
for them all offices of profit, exasperated the criollos, as 
the native-born colonists were called. They were 
further alienated by the stupidly repressive character 
of colonial administration. These follies and abuses, 
and the cruelties which accompanied the long War of 
Independence, seem to have effaced the sense of any 
community based on the Spanish name. One might, 
indeed, have rather found a bond in the common aver- 
sion to Spain and in a sympathy with one another 
springing out of the struggle against her power. The 
war was, however, in the main, waged independently by 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 447 

each colony. The Argentine army of San Martin gave 
effective help to Chile, and with Chilean troops practi- 
cally achieved the liberation of Peru, where the royal 
cause was strongest ; and in that result the Venezuelan 
Bolivar had also a share. Colombia and Venezuela 
helped one another, and both helped Ecuador. But so 
far has this cooperation been from becoming a basis for 
friendship, that the bitterest of all South American 
antagonisms is that of Peru and Chile, and it is only 
recently that the danger of a conflict between Chile and 
Argentina has disappeared. 

Neither has their, common profession of the Roman 
Catholic faith served to strengthen affection among the 
republics. As there was no Protestantism in Spanish 
America, they were never called upon to rally together 
in defence of the Church, and in some republics men 
united to attack her privileges or her property. She 
has often brought not peace, but a sword. The only 
thing that to-day would draw the republics into line 
and knit them together would be any threat of aggres- 
sion from outside. They have long ceased to fear in- 
vasion, still less subjugation, by any European power. 
But the enormous strength of the United States and 
recollections both of the war she waged against Mexico 
in 1846 and of some more recent events make them 
watch the actions of that country with a sensitive sus- 
picion which even the correctness of her conduct in 
twice evacuating Cuba has not entirely dispelled. 

The observer who has realized that many of these 
states are not natural political entities, but the creation 



448 SOUTH AMERICA 

of a series of accidents, naturally wonders whether 
they are likely to remain as at present. May not the 
two or three greatest swallow up the weaker, or may 
not some of the smaller seek strength in a voluntary 
union, federal at first, and perhaps ultimately leading 
to a unitary state ? This is not impossible. The three 
republics of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador might 
renew the federal tie they dissolved in 1831. Some, or 
all, of the Central American republics might similarly 
form a confederation. Mr. Root, when Secretary of 
State of the United States, tactfully acting in con- 
junction with Mexico, succeeded in persuading all those 
republics to set up and promise to obey a sort of Federal 
Court of Justice for the determination of disputes be- 
tween them, and the Court still exists, though the prom- 
ise to use it has been generally forgotten when the time 
came. There are those who think that Bolivia, one of 
the least homogeneous ^among South American countries, 
may possibly be partitioned, like Poland, by her more 
powerful neighbours, but of this there seems no present 
risk. It is chiefly in Central America that the existing 
situation may be deemed to lack stability, for while 
Costa Rica and Salvador are comparatively peaceful 
and well-governed states, and Guatemala has latterly 
kept quiet, Nicaragua and Honduras have been in a 
state of constant disturbance, and any ambitious presi- 
dent attaining power in either might be tempted to 
attack his neighbours. 

It is of more importance to enquire what are the pros- 
pects of a continued and durable peace in the continent 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 449 

of South America. Here three states stand out as far 
stronger than any of the others. Chile, Argentina, and 
Brazil have all of them considerable armies, and have 
now provided themselves with fleets, including powerful 
ironclads, not in any direct or immediate contemplation 
of war, nor because any one of them is threatened by any 
other naval power, but apparently in imitation of the 
United States and of the largest nations of the Old 
World. It seems to be thought nowadays that the dig- 
nity and status of great nations require a big navy, 
just as in the sixteenth century a nobleman of high de- 
gree was expected to travel about with and maintain a 
crowd of useless retainers. Each of these three nations is 
as strong as any two of the other republics. Next to 
tftem come Peru and Uruguay, while the northern states, 
Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, find their chief de- 
fensive strength in the difficult nature of their territories. 
There has been no war (other than a civil war) in 
South America since 1883, when peace was made be- 
tween Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The tension over dis- 
puted boundaries between Argentina and Chile ended 
with the acceptance of the Delimitation Award made by 
the king of England in 1902. The friction between 
Argentina and Brazil which arose once or twice at a 
later date seems to have passed away, and the friendly 
relations now subsisting between these three, which one 
may call the Great Powers of the Continent, are of good 
augury for the averting of hostilities, more than once 
threatened, between Ecuador and Peru and between Co- 
lombia and Ecuador. The influence of the United States 

2g 



450 SOUTH AMERICA 

also has been usefully exerted towards the same end. 
Most of the causes to which European wars have been 
due are absent from this Continent. There are no re- 
ligious differences. There are, as between states, no race 
questions, no nationalities held in bondage against their 
will and struggling to be free. There are no rival claims 
to lay hold of unoccupied or semicivilized territories in 
other parts of the world. 

Fish, and the element in which fish live, have often 
been quarrelled over elsewhere, but in South America 
there are no fishing rights worth a quarrel (except per- 
haps the pearl fisheries of Panama), and the only water 
questions that have ever given trouble are those relating 
to the respective jurisdictions of Argentina and Uruguay 
in the river Plate estuary and regarding the navi- 
gation rights of Colombia and Venezuela in the river 
Orinoco. Boundary disputes remain. Some of them, 
like that of Chile and Argentina, that of Bolivia 
and Argentina, and that of Brazil and Peru, have 
been recently settled, but there are still outstanding 
not only the controversy between Peru and Chile regard- 
ing Tacna and Arica, 1 but also the three-cornered quarrel 
of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru about their respective 
claims to the half-explored Amazonian region in which 
their territories meet on the eastern side of the Andes. 

There remains an unclassifiable margin of other possi- 
ble incidents which might precipitate into war the inhab- 
itants of the more backward republics, men of an over- 

1 Steps have recently been taken for smoothing down this con- 
troversy, and diplomatic relations between Chile and Peru seem 
likely to be now resumed. (Note to edition of February, 1913.) 



THE RISE OF NEW NATIONS 451 

sensitive and explosive temper, a temper which holds 
every question to be one of honour, and even if it has 
been induced to accept a reference to arbitration, refuses 
to accept the award when rendered. Thus the danger 
of wars in this Continent cannot be deemed to have 
vanished, though it has so greatly diminished that 
its extinction seems to approach. Let us, nevertheless, 
remember one possible contingency. Now and then 
there has arisen in some republic a man of ruthless force 
whose unslaked ambition, after it has made him master 
of his own country, turns its arms against its neighbours. 
Though there are signs that the era of revolutions and 
tyrannies is passing away, such a man might again 
appear, rising by the favour of the populace and ruling 
by military force, and he might try to strengthen his 
domestic control by foreign conquest. 

Of wars with European Powers there has for a long 
time past been no question, and as those Powers do not 
try to annex South American territories, and have no 
causes of quarrel except when their subjects complain of 
debts unpaid and injuries inflicted, so the South Ameri- 
cans have not taken a hand in the game of Old World 
politics. They need not now be tempted to do so, for there 
is at present plenty in the changeful relations of their own 
republics to engage the capacity of the ablest statesman. 
As to what may happen when one or two of the South 
American countries have reached the population and 
wealth of France or Italy, it is vain to speculate. Those 
who live to see that day will see a world wholly unlike 
our own. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 

Although races, unlike in character and differing in 
the scale of upward progress, must have come into 
contact from the earliest times, it is only in recent 
years that the phenomena attending that contact have 
been carefully observed and studied. From the end of 
the fifteenth century European nations have been con- 
quering the backward races. In some countries they 
enslaved, in others they extirpated, these races. They 
have now portioned out the whole world of savagery, 
barbarism, and semicivilization among themselves, so 
that, as the result of discoveries, wars, and treaties, six 
great and three smaller powers 1 have now appropriated 
all the extra-European world, except three or four an- 
cient Asiatic states. In our own day the questions 
connected with race contact have obtained both a new 
moral interest, because the old methods of killing off the 
so-called lower branches of mankind by the sword or by 
slavery have fallen into discredit, and also a new scien- 
tific interest, because we have become curious to know 
what are the effects of a mixture of markedly dissimilar 
racial stocks. Such mixture raises some of the most ob- 
scure problems in the doctrine of heredity. Does the 

1 Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, 
Belgium, Holland, and Portugal. 

452 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 453 

blending of one race with another tend to weaken or to 
improve the breed, and how far are any marked qualities 
of one parent stock transmissible by blood to a mixed 
progeny which is placed in and powerfully affected by 
a different environment ? Spanish America offers a large 
and varied field for the study of these and other similar 
questions, and a field which has been, so far, little ex- 
amined. My own knowledge does not go far enough 
to enable me to do more than state a few broad facts 
and suggest to those who have better opportunities for 
enquiry some of the problems which the subject presents. 
When the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors began 
to occupy the New World they found it peopled every- 
where by native tribes whose physical characteristics 
and, to some extent, their languages also, indicated that 
although they had inhabited America during countless 
ages, they probably all had the same, and that an east 
Asiatic, origin. No part of the two continents from 
Behring's Straits to Cape Horn (except a few hopelessly 
barren deserts) was quite untenanted, but some re- 
gions were far more populous than others. These regions 
were the high plateaus of Anahuac (Mexico) with the 
adjoining lower regions of Yucatan and Guatemala, the 
plateau of Bogota, and the plateau of Peru. It was in 
these that the greatest progress had been made toward 
civilization and a settled agricultural life; while the 
lower woodlands and the more or less arid prairies, 
such as those of the Missouri and of southern Argen- 
tina, were more thinly inhabited. There may well 
have been in Anahuac and Yucatan as many people as in 



454 SOUTH AMERICA 

all the rest of North America, and in the Peruvian realm 
of the Incas as many people as in all the rest of South 
America. 

Now the existence of this aboriginal population has 
been and still is a factor of the first magnitude in all 
parts of the continent (except Argentina and Uruguay, 
where it hardly exists), and in this fact lies one of the 
most striking contrasts between the northern and 
southern halves of the Western Hemisphere. The im- 
portance of the native Indian element in South America 
— and the same thing holds true of Mexico and Central 
America — resides partly in the fact that it furnishes 
the bulk of the labouring people and a large part of 
the army, partly in the influence which it has exerted, 
and still exerts, on the .whites, commingling its blood 
with theirs and affecting their habits and life in many 
ways. 

When the Spaniards came to the New World, they 
came mainly for the sake of gold. Neither the extension 
of trade, the hope of which prompted the Dutch, nor the 
acquisition of lands to be settled and cultivated, thereby 
extending the dominion of their crowns, which moved 
most of the English and French, nor yet the desire of 
freedom to worship God in their own way, which sent 
out the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England, — none 
of these things were uppermost in the minds of the 
companions of Columbus and Ponce de Leon, of Vasco 
Nunez and Cortes and Pizarro. No doubt they also 
desired to propagate the faith, but their spiritual aims 
were never suffered to interfere with their secular 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 455 

enterprises. Few settlers came from Spain to till the 
land. The first object was to seize all that could be 
found of the precious metals, much to the astonish- 
ment of- the natives, who thought that gold must 
be to them a sort of fetich. The next was to dis- 
cover mines of those metals and make the Indians 
work them. The third was to divide up the more fertile 
districts into large estates, allotting to each adventurer 
his share of labourer-natives along with his share of the 
lands. No settlers came out to clear the ground from 
wood and build homes upon it, as did the colonists of New 
England, and those also who sought to create a New 
France on the St. Lawrence. No Spaniard thought of 
tilling the soil himself. Why should he, when he could 
make others till it for him ? Where it was already under 
cultivation by the native peasants, they were turned 
into serfs attached to the encomienda. Where there was 
forest, the conquerors seldom troubled themselves to fell 
it, and that which they found as wilderness remained 
wilderness in the hands of the savage tribes. Where it 
was open prairie, there was as little reason for disturb- 
ing the nomads who wandered over it. Accordingly, 
the invaders became a ruling caste, living on the 
labour of their Indian serfs, and for a long time they 
confined themselves to the lands on which the latter 
were already established. So it befell that the abo- 
rigines, who in the northern parts of North America 
were either destroyed or driven out to the west, con- 
tinued to be in Spanish America one-half or more of 
the population, those who were already semicivilized 



456 SOUTH AMERICA 

being kept as labourers, those who were savages 
being left to themselves in their forests or half-desert 
prairies. No agricultural European population grew 
up in the settled districts. As there were aborigines on 
the spot to cultivate the land already improved, com- 
paratively few negroes were transported from Africa, and 
these chiefly to the shores of the Caribbean and to Peru. 
It was only in the tropical regions of the Antilles and 
(somewhat later) of Brazil that negro slavery grew up 
on a large scale ; and even there mining, rather than 
agriculture, was the first cause of their being brought ^ 
from Africa. The need for negroes was not great in 
Mexico or Peru, because the native Indians were of a 
hardier stock than the feeble Arawaks of the Antilles, 
and lived on under their European masters, though 
ground down and reduced in numbers by ill treat- 
ment. Thus when at last the Spanish colonies as- 
serted their independence, they started without that 
incubus of a mass of negro slaves which brought so 
much trouble upon the southern states of the North 
American Union. 

Between the numerous aboriginal tribes there were the 
greatest differences not only in their degree of advance- 
ment toward civilization, but in intelligence, in virility, 
in fighting quality, and in that kind of resisting power 
which enables a people to survive under oppression. The 
best fighters seem to have been — I am not now includ- 
ing the tribes of eastern North America — the Aztecs 
of Mexico and the Mapoche or Araucanians of Chile. 
The Caribs in some of the Lesser Antilles and in Vene- 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 457 

zuela were fierce and tenacious, while their neighbours, 
the Arawaks of the other Antilles, seem to have become 
extinct under Spanish severities in half a century. 
We have no materials for even the vaguest guess at the 
numbers of these tribes, but it is evident that some dis- 
appeared altogether, and that others were greatly re- 
duced. The Chibchas of Bogota, who were estimated at 
a million when first reached by the Conquerors, are 
said by a Spanish annalist to have been almost extermi- 
nated in twenty years. Of the Mochicas or Yuncas 
on the Peruvian coast, still numerous at the coming of 
Pizarro, though many had perished during their conquest 
by the Incas, few were left after half a century, and their 
cities have long been heaps of ruins, perhaps partly be- 
cause the irrigation works which brought water to them 
were allowed to perish. A census taken in Peru by the 
Viceroy Toledo in a.d. 1575 is said to have shewn eight 
millions of Indians in what is now Peru and Bolivia. 
Two centuries later there were less than half that num- 
ber. So it is stated that the Indians round Panama 
rapidly declined in number when the Spaniards estab- 
lished themselves there. The natives of northeast- 
ern Brazil were killed off in the end of the sixteenth 
century, though the tale that two millions were de- 
stroyed in about twenty years is scarcely credible ; 
and the less numerous tribes of central Argentina and 
Uruguay have entirely vanished. The process still goes 
on, though to-day the means are usually less violent. 
It is intoxicating liquors and European diseases, not any 
ill treatment by the Chileans, that have been reducing 



458 SOUTH AMERICA 

the stalwart Araucanians to a fourth or fifth part of 
what they were eighty years ago, and the Tehuelches 
and other Patagonian tribes, including the wretched 
Fuegians, are dying out largely from natural causes. 
But in the Amazonian forests along the Putumayo 
river — and that within the last few years — the cruel- 
ties and oppressions practised by the rubber gatherers 
upon the helpless Indians have destroyed many thou- 
sands of lives and apparently altogether blotted out 
some tribes. 

How many aborigines now remain in Latin America, 
it is impossible to ascertain. Even in such advanced 
countries as Mexico and Peru, there are no trustworthy 
figures, not only because it is impossible to find means 
of counting the wild nomads of northwestern Mexico 
and the still wilder savages of eastern Peru, but also 
because, even in the civilized districts, it is hard to de- 
termine who is to be deemed an Indian and who a 
mestizo, or half-breed. However, any estimate, if clearly 
understood to be merely conjectural, is better than 
none at all, so I may say that in Mexico 1 there are 
probably, out of fifteen millions of people, about eight 
millions of Indians, with at least six millions of mixed 
blood, and the rest Spaniards ; while in Peru and Bolivia, 
out of a total of about six millions, three and a half 
millions are Indians, one and a half millions mestizos, 

1 The more usual estimates (e.g. that in the Statesman's Year Book 
for 1912) give 19 per cent of pure Spaniards, 43 per cent mestizos, and 
38 per cent Indians, but enquiries made from many well-informed peo- 
ple in Mexico led me to believe that the proportion of Indians is much 
larger, and probably about that stated in the text. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 459 

and the rest more or less pure Spaniards. 1 The one 
state which is almost wholly Indian, so that the 
Guarani language is the prevailing tongue, is the inland 
country of Paraguay, and the one which has no In- 
dians at all is Uruguay, lying on the coast, not far from 
Paraguay. Of the total population of South America, 
estimated at forty-five millions, probably eight to nine 
millions may be pure Indians. Besides these there are, 
possibly, thirteen millions of mestizos or half-breeds, 
and fifteen of persons who deem themselves white, 
even if a good many have some infusion of aboriginal 
blood. 2 But if we omit Argentina, almost entirely, and 
Uruguay entirely, white, as well as Brazil, and confine 
our view to the other eight republics in which the 
Indian element is larger, a probable estimate would 
put the number of pure Indians at more than double 
that of the whites, and a little less than that of the 
mestizos. Upon such a computation the total quantity 
of native blood would much exceed the European. 
Such an estimate, however, can make no claim to ac- 
curacy. I give it only because it seems, from all I 
could gather, to represent, in a rough sort of way, the 

1 Brazil is believed to have nearly two millions of aborigines, 
most of them savages, Argentina perhaps fifty thousand, Chile one 
hundred twenty thousand (including the Fuegians). For the four 
northern republics and for the five of Central America no fig- 
ures exist, but the bulk of their population, which may be roughly 
taken at nine millions, is Indian, and pure whites constitute a 
small minority, which is probably largest in Costa Rica, Colombia, 
and Panama. 

2 There are also eight or nine millions of negroes and mulattoes 
(nearly all in Brazil). 



460 SOUTH AMERICA 

proportions of the races. Anyone who chooses to con- 
sider all the more educated mestizos as whites, and all 
Indians with any touch of white blood as mestizos, 
would, of course, bring out different figures. The ten- 
dency of official statistics is in that direction, for every- 
body wishes to be reckoned as a white man, but such 
a method does not truly represent the racial facts. 

Of the total of about nine millions of Indians, two or 
three millions may be wild, Indios bravos, as the South 
Americans call them, and in little contact with civilized 
whites or mestizos. To this class belong many of the 
aborigines in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, 
as well as most of the far smaller number still left in 
Argentina. Of the more or less civilized and settled 
Indians, more than one-half, about three and a half mil- 
lions, are in Peru and Bolivia ; and it is of these that I 
shall now proceed to speak, as I had opportunities in 
these countries of ascertaining their position, and as they 
are themselves more interesting, because they are the 
descendants of what was, before the Spanish Conquest, 
a comparatively advanced people. What is true of them 
is, moreover, true, in a general sense, as regards the set- 
tled aborigines of the northern republics. In those 
states, however, there is no such solid mass of sedentary 
agricultural Indians as dwell on the plateaux and inter- 
Andean valleys of Peru and Bolivia. 

Though at the time of the Conquest there were prob- 
ably in the Inca empire many different tribes speaking 
different languages, all have now been fused into two, 
the Quichuas to the north of Lake Titicaca, and the 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 461 

Aymaras, both around its shores and to the south of 
it in Bolivia. Having given some account of both 
races in earlier chapters, 1 1 need only add that the two 
languages are generally spoken all over the central 
Andes from the frontiers of Ecuador on the north to 
those of Chile and Argentina on the south. Compara- 
tively few of these Indians, probably less than a fifth, 
are able to talk Spanish. Some few live in the towns and 
practise handicrafts. Three-fourths of the population 
of La Paz is Aymard, while in Cuzco at least one- 
third is Quichua. The vast majority, however, are 
country folk cultivating the soil as tenants or labour- 
ers or tending sheep and cattle as herdsmen for the 
landowners, who are, of course, either of Spanish or 
of mixed blood. Comparatively few Indians own small 
plots of their own. The landlords, who in the colonial 
times oppressed the peasants so atrociously as from 
time to time to provoke even this naturally sub- 
missive people to rebellion, no longer venture to prac- 
tise the exactions and cruelties of those days. Author- 
ity is not feared as it was then, and could not be used to 
support such flagrant injustice. Neither do the clergy 
wring money from their flocks, as in those old bad days, 
though even now the fees charged for marriages are so 
high that the rite is commonly neglected. The ancient 
tribal system has melted away and the cacique, as the 
Spaniards called him, who was the head of a local com- 
munity down till the end of the eighteenth century, is 
now gone, but the old organization of the dwellers in a 
* Chapters III-V. 



462 SOUTH AMERICA 

village by brotherhoods, and resting, or supposed to rest,, 
upon blood relationship, still exists, and local affairs are 
managed by the local officials mentioned in an earlier 
chapter. 1 Thus, the Indian is left very much to 
himself, except that he pays rent to the landlord and 
is often bound to render him personal service at his 
residence during part of the year. This is called 
the Mita. His food is not very nutritious, consisting 
largely of chunof, i.e. frozen potatoes, usually ground 
into flour. His clothing is scanty, his mode of life hard 
and wretched, especially on the bleak plateaux. Yet 
he is not in that abject poverty which fears starva- 
tion; perhaps, indeed, not so near the minimum level of 
subsistence as are millions of the people in China and 
India. He does not contrast his own evil case with 
the luxury of the rich, as do the slum dwellers of Euro- 
pean cities, nor does he feel his case to be evil, for it 
is no worse than his forefathers have borne for ten gen- 
erations, and he knows no other. 

Not only the Quichuas and Aymaras, but the In- 
dians of the northern republics and of southern Chile are 
quite illiterate, and, as respects education, just where 
they were under the Incas, perhaps rather farther 
back, because there was then a sort of national life 
which has been long since quenched. There seems to be 
among them little or no desire for instruction. Even 
should any seek to rise in life, he would find no means of 
doing so, unless perchance some kindly priest should 
give the rudiments of knowledge to a boy brighter 

1 See Chapter V, p. 180. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 463 

than the rest. Religion does nothing to stir their minds. 
They are nominally Christians, but of many of them that 
may be said to-day which was said in 1746 by the hu- 
mane and orthodox Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and 
Jorge Juan, whose secret report upon things in South 
America, and among others upon the condition of the 
Indians in Peru and Ecuador, made to the king of 
Spain, was published in England eighty years later. 
They say : — 

" The religion of the Indians is no more like the 
Christian religion than it is to that which they had 
while they were pagans, for if the matter be well ex- 
amined it will be found that notwithstanding the nom- 
inal conversion of these tribes, so small is the progress 
they have made in knowledge that it will be hard to dis- 
cover any difference between the state in which they 
now find themselves, and that in which they were at 
the time of the Conquest." * 

That the influence of the priesthood did not commend 
religion to the people nor relieve their misery may be 
gathered from this further extract from the same secret 
report: — 

" The miserable state of the Indians is to be ascribed 
to the vices of the parish priests (curas), the extortions 

1 Noticias Secretas de America, p. 353. This remarkable book, 
published by David Barry in 1826, quarto (Taylor, London) , from 
a manuscript which he obtained in Madrid, gives a frightful de- 
scription of the cruelties and oppressions practised on the Indians. 
It does not, however, seem to have led to any efforts at reform. 
It is accepted as authentic by good authorities. I owe the reference 
to the book of Professor Bernard Moses, South America on the Eve 
of Emancipation, The Southern Colonies. 



464 SOUTH AMERICA 

of the corregidores, and the bad treatment which they 
generally receive from all Spaniards. Unable to endure 
their sufferings, and longing to escape from slavery, 
many of them have risen up and moved off to uncon- 
quered districts, there to continue in the barbarous 
practices of heathenism. ... In the community of 
Pimampiro in the province of Quito, which consisted 
of more than 5000 Indians, and was prosperous, the 
conduct of the parish priest drove the Indians to de- 
spair. Uniting in one body, they rose in rebellion and 
in one night passed to the Cordillera, where they joined 
themselves to the wild heathen Indians, with whom 
they have continued until now." 1 

It ought to be remembered that the avarice and moral 
faults charged upon the clergy in these reports, as well 
as in other accounts belonging to the eighteenth cen- 
tury are brought against the parish priests rather than 
the religious orders, although Ulloa describes the level 
of conduct as having sadly declined among these also. 
To some of the orders, most of all to the Jesuits, and in a 
less degree to the early Dominicans, much credit is due 
for their efforts not only to spread the gospel, often at 
the risk of their lives, but also to secure justice for the 
unfortunate Indians. The great Las Casas was only 
the most conspicuous among many admirable Spanish 
churchmen who threw their hearts into this campaign 
of humanity, though they seldom prevailed against the 
hard-hearted rapacity of the land owners and mine 
owners who wished to keep the Indians in serfdom and 

1 Noticias Secretas, ut supra, p. 343. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 465 

did not care how many perished under their hands. 
These worthy ecclesiastics sometimes secured good ordi- 
nances from the Council of the Indies in Spain, but the 
colonial governors found that the path of least resistance 
was to proclaim the ordinance and wink at its neglect. 
On many a law was the note made, "It is obeyed, but 
not executed" (Se obedece pero no se ejecuta). In Para- 
guay, where the population was almost wholly Indian, the 
reign of the Jesuits was generally beneficent. They could 
not do much for the education of the mass of their sub- 
jects, but while they trained some few of the promising 
youth, they impressed habits of industry and good conduct 
upon the rest. Perhaps it is to the excessive inculca- 
tion of obedience that the blind submissiveness of the 
later Paraguayans to such despots as Francia and Lopez 
may be partly attributed. 1 

The oppressions, both civil and ecclesiastical, referred 
to in the extracts given above, have long since ceased, 
but their consequences remain in the abject state of the 
aborigines and their ignorance of the truths and pre- 
cepts of Christianity. As a learned student of Indian 
life observes, it is to them a kind of magic, more power- 
ful for some purposes than their own ancient magic 
which was based on nature worship. "They believe in 
Dios (God)," says Mr. Bandelier, 2 "but believe more 
in Nuestra Serlora de la Luz (Our Lady of the Light) 

1 Half the population of Paraguay perished in the war of the 
younger Lopez, the third of the line of dictators that ruled the 
country from 1818 to 1870. 

2 Islands of Titicaca and Koati, quoted in Chapter IV. 

2h 



466 SOUTH AMERICA 

at Copacavana." They worship evil spirits and make 
offerings to the mountain Achachilas and to the Earth. 
Even in Mexico, where the Indians are, as a rule, much 
more subject to enlightening influences, I was told in 
1901 that an archbishop, visiting the parishes of his dio- 
cese not long before, had found the ancient idols hidden 
away behind the altars and occasionally brought out at 
night to receive marks of reverence. The Peruvians 
had at the conquest hardly advanced to the stage of a 
regular mythology with images of the deities, so idols 
were less common and prominent, while the worship 
of the spirits immanent in natural objects was uni- 
versal. 

Where the church fails to stir the currents of intellec- 
tual life among the masses of such a people as this, 
what other influence is there to make for progress ? 

These Peruvian races were specially unfortunate be- 
cause their natural leaders, the caciques or local chief- 
tains who had formed a sort of aristocracy before the 
Conquest, were either slaughtered or, in some few cases, 
incorporated into the colonial upper class, so that they 
were lost, as protectors, to the subject class, who, hav- 
ing little force of character, sank unresistingly into serf- 
dom. Once, in 1781-1783, under the leadership of Tu- 
pac Amaru, of whom I have spoken briefly in an earlier 
chapter, they rose in a revolt which lasted for three 
years. Being unwarlike and untrained, ill-armed and 
ill-led, they were defeated with great slaughter, after 
atrocious cruelties had been perpetrated on both sides. 
But they accomplished one feat rare in the annals of 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 467 

war in destroying, along with its Spanish garrison, the 
city of Sorata, which they had long besieged in vain, 
by damming up the course of a mountain torrent and 
turning its full stream on the place. Since those days, 
even the few chiefs that then remained have vanished, 
and the aboriginal race consists wholly of the poorest 
and most neglected part of the population. That which 
to them makes life tolerable is the incessant chewing of 
coca, a very old habit, but now less costly than in Inca 
days, because the leaf can be more easily imported from 
the hot country east of the Andes. 

Their en j oyments are two . One is intoxication, mostly 
with chicha, the old native beverage, but now also with 
fiery alcohol, made from the sugar-cane. The other is 
dancing at their festivals. The priests, when they were 
converting the natives, thought it better not to disturb 
the ancient heathen dances, but to transfer them to 
the days which the church sets apart for its feasts, ex- 
punging, so far as they could, the more offensive fea- 
tures of the dance, though what remains is sufficiently 
repulsive. Such ceremonial performances are common 
among the Indians of North America, also, and used 
often to be kept up for days together before a declara- 
tion of war. The dances of the Hopi and other Indians 
which the visitor sees to-day in Arizona are dull and 
decorous affairs. A striking description of the dances 
which he saw at Tiahuanaco on Corpus Christi Day is 
given by Mr. Squier, 1 and the much more recent account 
given by Mr. Bandelier of those he witnessed on another 

1 Travels in Peru, p. 305 sqq. 



468 SOUTH AMERICA 

festival at Copacavana shew that things are much the 
same to-day. 1 The music, of a drum-and-fife type, is 
loud, harsh, and discordant, but this does not imply 
that a taste for sweet sound is wanting, for the Indian 
often carries his simple flute or pipe with him on his 
journeys and enjoys the monotonous ditties which he 
makes it discourse. 

Three other facts may be adduced to illustrate the 
condition of the aborigines. There is no recent litera- 
ture in their languages, not even a newspaper or maga- 
zine. They seem to be very rarely ordained as priests, 
though I was told in Mexico that there are a good 
many Indian priests there ; and it seldom happens that 
any Indian rises into the learned or even into the edu- 
cated class. I heard of one such at Lima, who had a 
remarkable knowledge of natural history; there may 
have been others. 

Whether owing to the character of the Indians, or to 
their fear of the white man, robberies and assaults are 
rare not only among the more gentle Quichuas, but 
also in Bolivia, where the Aymaras, a more dour and 
sullen race, frequently break the peace among them- 
selves, village attacking village with sticks and slings, 
while the women carry bags of stones to supply ammu- 
nition for the men's slings. In fact, the safety of the 
solitary European traveller in most parts of South Amer- 

1 Islands of Titicaca and Koati, p. 40 sqq. This learned stu- 
dent of Indian customs thinks that the drinking may have orig- 
inated in the ceremonial offerings of chicha to the spirits. Its 
continuance needs no explanation. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 469 

ica is almost as remarkable as the like circumstance in 
India. 

In respect of civil rights, there is no legal distinction 
between the Indian and the white. Both enjoy the same 
citizenship for all private and public purposes, to both 
is granted the equal protection of the laws, equal suf- 
frage, equal eligibility to office. This is to some extent 
a guarantee to the Indian against ill treatment, but it 
does not raise him in the social scale. He seldom casts 
a vote ; not, indeed, that it makes much difference in 
these countries whether the citizen votes or not, for a 
paternal government takes charge of the elections. He 
is never — so far as I could learn — a candidate for any 
national office. The laws of the two republics interfere 
very little with his life, which is regulated by ancestral 
custom. Even in revolutions he does not seem to come 
to the front. He is, however, willing to fight, and a 
good fighter both in foreign and in civil wars, however 
little interest he may take in the cause. But for this 
fact there would have been fewer and shorter revolu- 
tions. Thus the Indian is a member of the nation for 
military, if not for political, purposes. The former are 
at least nearer to his comprehension than the latter, 
for he cares, and thinks of caring, about politics no more 
than did the needy knife-grinder in Canning's verses. 
No one has yet preached to him the gospel of democ- 
racy; no one has told him that he has anything to 
gain from action as a citizen. The whole thing is as com- 
pletely out of his sphere as if he were still living under 
the Spanish viceroys, or, indeed, under the rule of the 



470 SOUTH AMERICA 

Inca Huayna Capac. There is, therefore, not yet any 
"Indian question" in South America. 1 There ought 
to be an Indian question : that is to say, there ought to 
be an effort to raise the Indians economically and edu- 
cationally. But they have not yet begun to ask to be 
raised. 

So much for the Indian as he is in Peru and Bolivia ; 
and, apparently, also in those settled parts of north- 
western Argentina where Indians still remain. In Par- 
aguay the position is so far different that the Indians 
form not the lowest class, but the bulk of the nation. 
In the forest-covered regions of the Amazon and its 
tributaries, the Indios bravos are outside civilization 
altogether. 

To understand the social relations of the white and 
Indian races one must begin by remembering that there 
is in Spanish and Portuguese countries no such sharp 
colour line as exists where men of Teutonic stock are 
settled in countries outside Europe. As this is true 
of the negro, it is even more true of the Indian. He 
may be despised as a weakling, he may be ignored as 
a citizen, he may be, as he was at one time, abomi- 
nably oppressed and ill treated, but he excites no per- 
sonal repulsion. It is not his race that is against him, 
but his debased condition. Whatever he suffers, is 
suffered because he is ignorant or timid or helpless, not 
because he is of a different blood and colour. Accord- 

1 There has been formed in Lima a society for the protection of 
the Indians, but I could not learn that it has been able to do much 
in the parts of Peru that lie far from the capital. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 471 

ingly the Spanish Americans do not strive to keep off 
and keep down the Indian in such wise as the North 
Americans and the Dutch and the English — I do not 
mean the governments, but the individuals — treat their 
black subjects. There is not even such aversion to 
him as is shewn in California and in Australia to 
the Chinese, Japanese, and Hindus. The distinction 
between the races is in Spanish America a distinction 
of rank or class rather than of colour. Against inter- 
marriage there is, therefore, no more feeling than that 
which exists against any union palpably below a man's 
or woman's own rank in life. If it is rare for a pure 
white to espouse a pure Indian, that is because they 
are of different ranks, just as it is rare for a well-born 
Englishman to marry a peasant girl. There is nothing 
in the law to oppose such a union, and though whites 
seldom marry pure Indians, because the classes come 
little into contact, the presence of an unmistakable In- 
dian strain in a suitor makes no difference to his 
acceptability to a white woman of the same rank 
Whether this contrast between the Spanish attitude 
towards the Indian and the Anglo-American attitude 
to the negro is due to differences between Roman 
Catholicism and Protestantism, 1 or to the fact that the 

1 The sense of membership in a concrete community (a Visible 
Church) consisting of persons of whatever race who participate 
in the same sacraments is stronger in the Roman than in the 
Protestant churches ; and as a member of a lower race who has 
been ordained a priest is thereby raised to a position which is in 
a sense above that of any layman, the race itself is raised in his 
person. 



472 SOUTH AMERICA 

Indian was never legally a slave, or to the fact that the 
aboriginal American races shew a less marked diver- 
gence in colour and features from the white than does 
the negro, is a question which need not be here dis- 
cussed. Possibly all three causes may contribute to 
the result ; and probably the circumstance that most 
of the early Spaniards, having brought no wives with 
them, treated their numerous children by Indian women 
as being legitimate and belonging to their own race, 
was also a factor. Such a usage, established in the 
days of the Conquest, would naturally continue to affect 
men's attitude. The result is anyhow one of great 
significance, and makes the racial problem here quite 
different from what it is in the southern states of North 
America. 

The most salient point of difference lies in the posi- 
tion of the half-breed or mestizo. In North America 
a mulatto, a quadroon, even an octoroon who is only 
one-eighth black, counts as a negro. Here, except per- 
haps in a few of the oldest cities, a mestizo counts as a 
white. His half-Indian blood is no disparagement to 
his social standing, no obstacle to his reaching any 
public position. One may remark of such and such a 
person that he has evidently a strong infusion of Indian 
blood, of such another that he looks a Spaniard through 
and through, and the latter doubtless cherishes a secret 
satisfaction in his pure Iberian stock. But for the 
practical purposes of business and politics, the two, sup- 
posing them to belong to the same educated class, stand 
upon the same level. The families which value their 



/ 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 473 

lineage so highly that they would deem the marriage of 
a child to a person of mixed blood, otherwise desir- 
able, to be a mesalliance, must be now few, and hardly 
exist outside five or six cities — such as Bogota, Lima, 
Arequipa, and Santiago. 

Thus one may say that there is no "colour ques- 
tion" in South America. Its republics have political 
and economic problems enough, but they are spared a 
source of embarrassment and danger constantly present 
to the minds of thoughtful North Americans, and present 
also (though less painfully) to the minds of South Afri- 
cans. Although, therefore, both in Spanish America 
and in the United States there are social distinctions 
which coincide with race distinctions, the character of 
those distinctions is different. In both countries there 
are two sections. But in the United States everyone 
who is not white is classed as coloured, however slight 
the trace. In Spanish America everyone who is not 
wholly Indian is classed as white, however marked the 
Indian tinge. 1 Thus the mixed population, which in 
the United States swells the negro element, is in Span- 
ish America a part of the white nation, and helps to 
give that element its preponderance. And a further 
difference appears in the fact that whereas in the 
United States the man of colour is discriminated against 
for social purposes, irrespective of his wealth, educa- 

1 An infusion of negro blood, sometimes met with in the coast 
towns of Peru, is regarded with less favour than a like infusion of 
Indian blood, for while the first negro ancestor must have been a 
slave, the Indian ancestor may have been an Inca. 



474 SOUTH AMERICA 

tion, or personal qualities, in Spanish countries race 
counts for so little that when he emerges out of the 
poverty and ignorance which mark the Indian, his equal- 
ity with the white man is admitted. So rarely, however, 
does he emerge that one may broadly say that the Na- 
tion consists in these republics of white men and mesti- 
zos only, the Indian constituting, if not another nation, 
yet a separate nationality, marked off not merely by 
poverty, but by its language and the adherence of its 
members to ancient superstitions. They have nothing, 
except the worship of the saints and a fondness for 
liquor, in common with the class above them, for they 
speak a different language, think differently, feel differ- 
ently, have their own amusements, and cherish, in a dim 
way, faint memories of a time when their forefathers 
were masters of the land. They are not actively hostile 
to the white people, and, indeed, get on better with 
their landlords than some European peasantries have 
done with theirs. But they live apart, inside the nation, 
but not of it. The Aymaras are silent, suspicious, sul- 
len. The Quichuas are more kindly, but hardly less 
reserved. This reserve and suspicion characterize the 
Mexican Indian also, who is generally more intelligent 
than the Peruvian. 1 Both Aymaras and Quichuas are 
tenacious of their customs, and do not seek to assimi- 



1 A few years ago in northern Mexico a truck carrying a load of 
dynamite for use at a mine was suddenly discovered to be on fire 
at a village station. The risk was imminent, so the driver of a 
locomotive engine picked the truck up and ran it away into the 
country at all the speed he could put on. He bade the brakeman 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 475 

late any of that modern life and lore which has found 
its slow way even into the recesses of the Andes. No 
one from without tries to give it to them, no one rises 
from among themselves stirred by a desire to acquire 
it and then impart it to his fellows. 

This want of leading, and want not only of light but of 
a wish for light, is the feature of the Indian population 
which most surprises the traveller, because he knows of 
no parallel to it among the subject races of Europe in the 
past or those of western Asia to-day. The Greek and 
Armenian in Turkey have at times suffered as much from 
the Turk as the Quichua has suffered from his conquerors 
in Peru, but in intelligence and capacity for progress 
they have been the superiors of the Turk; and had 
there been more of them, they would before now have 
shaken off his control. , 

If it is asked how the presence of this solid Indian 
mass, unassimilated by the white nation, has affected 
that nation and the progress of the country as a whole, 
the answer is that in the first place it prevented all 
chance of the growth of a free European agricultural 
population, even in those high valleys where Europeans 
could work and thrive. Had the hardy and laborious 
peasantry of Galicia, Asturias, and Aragon settled in 
these regions, how much more robust, mentally and 
physically, might the nation have been! How much 

jump off and save himself, adding, "I go to my death." When 
he had got a mile away, the dynamite exploded. Every window 
in the village was broken, and he was blown to atoms, but the in- 
habitants were saved. He was a pure-blooded Indian. 



476 SOUTH AMERICA 

might agriculture have been improved had there been 
intelligent labour! But besides this want, and besides 
the weakening of the state by the lack of national spirit 
in half of its population, the presence of a large mass 
of ignorance and superstition has operated to reduce 
the general intellectual level. There have been coun- 
tries where a small rich and ruling class, living on the 
toil of inferiors, has cultivated art and letters with 
brilliant success, but we find nothing of the sort here. 
The ignorant mass has depressed the whole, as a glacier 
chills the air of its valley. 

Whether the Spanish stock has deteriorated through 
the mixture of Indian blood is a more difficult mat- 
ter to determine. The Peruvians and Bolivians 
of to-day, both whites and mestizos — and the same 
thing is true of Venezuelans and Ecuadoreans — dif- 
fer much from the Spaniards of the sixteenth century 
and from the European Spaniards of to-day. They 
are probably more excitable; they are naturally less 
industrious because they live in hot countries and have 
Indians to work for them. But in Spain itself there 
are great differences between the peoples of the north 
and the south and the east. The Catalans are more 
energetic than the Andalusians, the Gallegos more in- 
dustrious than the Valencians. The conditions of colo- 
nial life in the presence of a large aboriginal population, 
coupled with long misgovernment and intellectual stag- 
nation, account for a good deal of the variation from 
the Spanish type. It is a sound maxim never to lay 
weight upon uncertain causes when certain causes are 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 477 

available as explanations. Moreover our knowledge of 
heredity in its influence on race development is still 
imperfect. The Argentines, who are of an almost pure 
white stock, also differ much from the modern Spaniard. 

It might seem natural to assume a priori that men of 
pure European race would continue to hold the foremost 
place in these countries, and would shew both greater 
talents and a more humane temper than those in whose 
veins Indian blood flows. But I doubt if the facts sup- 
port such a view. Some of the most forceful leaders 
who have figured in the politics of these republics have 
been mestizos. I remember one, as capable and energetic 
and upright a man as I met anywhere in the continent, 
who looked at least half an Indian, and very little of a 
Spaniard. Nor have there been any more sinister fig- 
ures in the history of South America since the days of 
Pedro de Arias the infamous governor of Darien who 
put to death Vasco Nunez de Balboa, than some who 
were pure Spaniards. No half-breeds have shewn more 
ruthlessness than the Spanish Carbajal in the days of 
Pizarro, or than Rosas, the Argentine dictator of seventy 
years ago. And in this connection it deserves to be 
noticed that the ancient Peruvian Indians, though they 
thought nothing of indiscriminate slaughter and occa- 
sionally tortured captive enemies, did not generally 
shew the same taste for blood as the Aztecs shewed in 
their sacrifices nor the same propensity to methods of 
elaborate and long-drawn-out cruelty as did the Red 
men of North America. 

As I have so far been speaking chiefly of Peru 



478 SOUTH AMERICA 

and Bolivia, where the Indian population is larger and 
more civilized than elsewhere, a few observations 
ought to be added regarding the other republics in 
which a considerable aboriginal population remains. 
I omit Uruguay, because it has none at all. In Argen- 
tina there are some civilized Indians in the north- 
western districts round the cities of Jujuy and Tucuman, 
and to these the remarks made regarding their neigh- 
bours, the Bolivian Indians, apply. There are also 
wild Indians, perhaps one hundred thousand, perhaps 
more, on the Gran Chaco of the far north, 1 and the 
scattered remnants of nomad Patagonians in the far 
south and in Tierra del Fuego. These seem to be dis- 
appearing. The Onas in that island have been freely 
killed off by the ranchmen on whose flocks they preyed, 
and tubercular disease is destroying the rest. In Chile, 
besides the Araucanians, described in Chapter VI, there 
are a few small tribes, in a low state of barbarism, left 
in the archipelago of wet and woody isles along the 
Pacific coast. The rural population of the republic — 
indeed, nearly all of the poorer and less educated part of 
it — is mestizo, a bold and vigorous race, good workers 
and fine fighters. Paraguay is an almost purely Indian 
country. 

Of the four northern republics, Panama, Colombia, 
Venezuela, and Ecuador, I have seen only the first. 
In each of these the number of purely Spanish families 
is small. It is probably largest in Colombia. In Vene- 
zuela the Indians have been more largely absorbed into 

1 Some of these now come south to work on Argentine farms. 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 479 

the general population than has happened in Colom- 
bia and Ecuador. In all four states such of the In- 
dians as remain wild forest dwellers, are passive, and 
practically outside the nation, which is, as a social and 
political entity, predominantly mestizo. What has been i 
said of Peru and Bolivia is true of these states also : 
there is no colour line; the mestizos are treated as white 
and are not, as a class, intellectually inferior to the 
white. The Indian forms the lowest stratum, and sel- 
dom rises out of it. 

There remains Brazil, distinguished from the other re- 
publics by the fact that in addition to her small mestizo 
population and her pure Indian population, most of 
it wild, she has a great mass of negroes and a still 
larger mass of mulattoes and quadroons. It is hardly 
too much to say that along the coast from Rio to 
Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the 
interior behind these two cities, the black popu- 
lation predominates. In character and habits it 
somewhat resembles the negroes of the British West 
Indies and Santo Domingo, being superior to the Hay- 
tians, but inferior in education and enterprise to the 
coloured people of the southern states of North America. 
High as is its fecundity, its death-rate is also so high, 
owing to the general neglect of sanitary precautions, 
that it does not appear to be increasing relatively to 
the general population. It is well treated — slavery 
was seldom harsh among the kindly natured, easy-going 
Portuguese — and bears no ill-will to its former masters. 
Neither do they feel towards it that repulsion which 



j 



480 SOUTH AMERICA 

marks the attitude of the whites to the negroes in North 
Ajnerica and South Africa. The Brazilian lower class 
intermarries freely with the black people ; the Brazilian 
middle class intermarries with mulattoes and quadroons. 
Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the Por- 
tuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, 
in which a fusion of the European and African races is 
proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines 
of human equality and human solidarity have here 
their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory 
that there is little or no class friction. The white man 
does not lynch or maltreat the negro : indeed, I have 
never heard of a lynching anywhere in South America 
except occasionally as part of a political convulsion. 
The negro is not accused of insolence and does not 
seem to develop any more criminality than naturally 
belongs to any ignorant population with loose notions 
of morality and property. 

What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will 
have on the European element in Brazil I will not 
venture to predict. If one may judge from a few 
remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the 
intellectual standard. One of the ablest and most 
refined Brazilians I have known had some colour; and 
other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assump- 
tions and preconceptions must be eschewed, however 
plausible they may seem. 

The chief conclusions which the history of the rela- 
tions of races in the South American continent suggests 
are the three following. The first may be thought 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 481 

doubtful. It is negative rather than positive, and 
though it seems worth stating, I state it with diffi- 
dence. 

The fusion of two parent stocks, one more advanced, 
the other more backward, does not necessarily result in 
producing a race inferior to the stronger parent or supe- 
rior to the weaker. The mestizo in Peru is not palpa- 
bly inferior in intellect to the Spanish colonial of un- 
mixed blood, but seems to be substantially his equal. 
The mestizo in Mexico is not palpably superior — some 
doubt if he is at all superior either physically, morally, 
or intellectually — to the pure Tarascan or Zapotec In- 
dian, who is, no doubt, a stronger human being than 
the South American Quichua or Aymara. 

The second conclusion is this: Conquest and con- 
trol by a race of greater strength have upon some races 
a depressing and almost ruinous effect. The Peruvian 
subjects of the Incas had reached a state of advance- 
ment which, though much below that of the ancient 
Egyptians and Babylonians, was remarkable when one 
considers that their isolation deprived them of the enor- 
mous benefit of contact with other progressive peoples, 
and when one considers also the disadvantage of living 
at a great altitude, the absence of milk-yielding ani- 
mals, and the paucity both of animals capable of domes- 
tication and of cereal plants. The impact of Spanish 
invasion not only shattered their own rudimentary civil- 
ization to pieces, but so took all the heart and spirit out 
of them that they have made practically no advances 
during four centuries, and have profited hardly at all 
2i 



482 SOUTH AMERICA 

by the western civilization of their masters. The ab- 
origines of Mexico, having more stamina of intellect 
and will, have suffered less by the shock, but have 
done almost as little to assimilate the arts and ideas of 
Europe. 

Thirdly, the ease with which the Spaniards have 
intermingled by marriage with the Indian tribes — and 
the Portuguese have done the like, not only with the 
Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar negroes 
— shews that race repugnance is no such constant and 
permanent factor in human affairs as members of the 
Teutonic peoples, are apt to assume. Instead of being, 
as we Teutons suppose, the rule in this matter, we are 
rather the exception, for in the ancient world there 
seems to have been little race repulsion; there is 
very little to-day among Mohammedans; there is none 
among Chinese. This seems to suggest that since the 
phenomenon is not of the essence of human nature, it 
may not be always as strong among the Teutonic 
peoples as it is to-day. Religion has been in the past 
almost as powerful a dissevering force as has racial 
antagonism. In the case of Spaniards and Portuguese, 
religion, so soon as the Indians had been baptized, made 
race differences seem insignificant. Islam has always 
done this in the East and in Africa. 

As touching the future, it seems as certain as any- 
thing in human affairs can be that the races now in- 
habiting South America, aboriginal, European, and 
African, will be all ultimately fused. The Spanish re- 
publics (except the purely white Argentina and Uru- 



RELATIONS OF RACES IN SOUTH AMERICA 483 

guay) will be Ibero-American, Brazil will be Ibero- 
American-African. All present facts point that way, 
and that any hitherto unfelt repulsion will arise seems 
most improbable. When, however, will the process 
be complete ? In the Spanish republics, hardly before 
two centuries, probably not even then. It seems not 
much nearer now than it was in 1810, when the revolu- 
tionary struggles began, though anything which stirred 
up the Andean population, such as the discovery of a 
large number of new and rich mines, bringing in foreign 
labour and increasing the demand for domestic labour, 
or anything that roused a spirit of economic and politi- 
cal change, might accelerate the consummation. 

Still less predictable is the quality of the mixed race 
that will emerge. One cannot but fear that the Portu- 
guese of tropical Brazil may suffer from the further 
infusion of an element the moral fibre of which is con- 
spicuously weak, though there are those who argue 
that the blood of the superior race must ultimately 
transmute the whole. But we need not assume that the 
peoples of the Spanish republics will necessarily decline, 
for the present degradation of the Indians may be due as 
much to their melancholy history as to inherent defects. 
It is still too soon to be despondent. There may be 
in the Indian stock a reserve of strength, dormant, 
but not extinct, ready to respond to a new stimulus 
and to shoot upwards under more inspiriting conditions. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE TWO AMERICAS AND THE RELATION OF SOUTH 
AMERICA TO EUROPE 

Alexander Hamilton bade his fellow citizens to 
think continentally ; and Herodotus, in the short intro- 
duction prefixed to his history, explains its theme as 
being an account of the relations of two great con- 
tinents, Europe and Asia, and of the reasons which 
produced such recurring strife between them. Let us 
attempt to think a little of the southern part of the 
Western world as a whole, in its relations as a con- 
tinent to the other continents, and especially to that 
continent with which it is connected by a narrow 
neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama, and which has 
drawn its name from the same navigator. The series 
of incidents by which the name of a Florentine adven- 
turer was given, first, to a continent he probably did not 
discover, and then to another which he never saw, is as 
curious as anything in geographical history. 

Everybody knows that Christopher Columbus sailed 
out into the west in search of new lands, expecting 
them to be a part of Asia, and that to the day of his 
death, after four voyages, he believed that he had found 
India. 1 In the last of those voyages, when he was 

1 Though doubt has lately been thrown upon the letter of Tosca- 
nelli and upon the received belief that it was India that Columbus 
was seeking, he clearly believed on his return to Spain that it was 
India he had found. 

484 



THE TWO AMERICAS 485 

wearily beating up along the coast of Darien against 
the currents, he fancied himself near the Straits of 
Malacca. It is natural, therefore, that neither he nor his 
first successors in exploration should have given a name 
to the new western land south of the Caribbean Sea, even 
when, some while later, they had explored enough of it to 
recognize it for a continent. They named particular re- 
gions, but a general name was not needed because it 
was expected that the parts seen would turn out to be 
parts of Asia. Then in 1497 other voyagers who sailed 
forth to explore said that they found a new land, far 
off in the ocean to the southwest of the Canary Islands. 
Next year Columbus discovered on the south side of 
the Caribbean Sea the "Tierra Firma," which we call 
Venezuela. Americus Vespuccius of Florence, one of the 
ship's company of the 1497 voyage, wrote letters, giving 
an account of this (and of a later voyage, also) to the 
new land far to the southwest, in which he described 
it as " a New World, a New Fourth Part of the Globe," 
Europe, Asia, and Africa being the other three. The 
letters made a great sensation; and one of them was 
made the basis of a book called Cosmographies In- 
troduction published in 1507, at St. Die* in France, by a 
certain Waldseemtiller (Hylacomylus), a professor there, 
who suggested that as Americus was the discoverer of 
this Fourth Part of the World, it should be called after 
him. 1 The book was read far and wide ; the name took. 

1 The question as to the truth of Amerigo Vespucci's account 
of his voyages, and especially of the first one (1497) in which he 
claimed to have discovered a new land 1000 leagues west southwest 



486 SOUTH AMERICA 

It was not intended to be applied to the lands west and 
south of the Caribbean Sea, which between 1497 and 1507 
had been discovered by Columbus and others ; still less 
to the lands discovered by John Cabot in the far north, 
but to an entirely different piece of land much to the 
south and east of what Columbus had discovered. 
But when all the lands bordering on that part of the 
Atlantic had been sufficiently explored and the records 
of the voyages compared, it appeared that the lands 
lying in the part of the ocean to which the descriptions 
of Americus referred, were, in fact, continuous with the 
coasts of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. There- 
upon all the land from the Rio de la Plata (discovered 
in 1516) northward to the Isthmus of Panama, came 
to be included under the name America, just because 
there was no other general name for what had been, at 
least till 1513, when the Pacific was discovered by 
crossing the Isthmus at Darien, still believed to be part 
of Asia. As soon as the Pacific had been reached, and 
still more when the ever famous voyage of Magellan had 
shewn that Asia lay thousands of miles further away 
beyond the Pacific, a general name began to be wanted. 
Much later, and again, just because there was no other 
competing name, the term America was extended to 

of the Canary Islands is still the subject of controversy among learned 
men, but the prevalent opinion seems to be that the account is 
unworthy of credence. The letters were translated into Latin and 
ran through several editions. 

The name ' ' Americus, Amerigo " is an Italianized form of Amalrich, 
a name borne by some of the Gothic kings mentioned by Jordanes, 
and also by two of the Latin kings of Jerusalem in the twelfth cen- 
tury. It is the German Emeric and the French Amaury. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 487 

include everything north of the Gulf of Mexico up 
to the Arctic regions, and when the need was felt for 
distinguishing the two parts, the words North and 
South were added. Although applied earlier to the 
southern than to the northern continent, the name when 
used alone now denotes to most Europeans the latter. 

How much simpler and better it would have been if 
each continent had received a name of its own. South 
America might have been called after Columbus, as 
the first man who saw its terra firma, and North 
America might have received the name of Cabotia or 
Pinzonia or Ponceana, whichever navigator may be 
best entitled to be deemed its first and true dis- 
coverer. How much trouble would have been saved 
and how many mistakes avoided ! Italian peasants 
would not have fancied that a cousin who had gone 
to Buenos Aires was the near neighbour of another who 
had gone to New York. Similarities would not have 
been imagined where differences exist. The South 
Americans would not have resented the assumption by 
the people of the United States of the name to which 
they claim an equal right, and the people of the United 
States would not have formed the habit of believing 
that the Spanish and Portuguese speaking inhabitants 
of the southern continent are their affectionate relatives, 
because they share in the same family name. 

These, however, are vain regrets. The names have 
long been fixed, though for a great while the Spaniards 
declined to talk of North America. The thing is one 
instance among many to shew how much may flow 



488 SOUTH AMERICA 

from a name which is itself the result of a mere ac- 
cident. 

Now let us turn from names to things, and consider in 
what respect the two Americas, and their peoples, resem- 
ble and differ from one another, and how far they consti- 
tute, politically or otherwise, one whole world apart, and 
what are the relations of the southern, or Spanish and 
Portuguese, continent to the other, now mainly Teutonic, 
continent, and to the countries of Europe, and whether 
the term "Pan Americanism" describes a fact or merely 
conveys an interesting aspiration. Some points in the 
history of each continent may come out more clearly, 
and become more significant when the two are compared, 
for the history of each illustrates that of the other. 

The physical structure of the two continents shews 
certain similarities. Each is traversed from north to 
south by a great mountain chain, sometimes breaking 
into parallel ridges and sometimes widening out into 
high tablelands. In each this chain is much nearer to 
the western than to the eastern coast, and in each there 
are volcanic outbursts at various points along the lines of 
elevation, these being more continuous and on a vaster 
scale in the southern continent. In each there is, 
moreover, an independent mountain mass on the east- 
ern side, the Appalachian system in North America, 
the Brazilian highlands in South America. Each has, 
nearer to its western than to its eastern coast, a desert, 
and in that desert an inland river basin with lakes, 
Great Salt Lake in Utah corresponding roughly to 
Lakes Titicaca and Poopo in Bolivia. Each has two 



THE TWO AMERICAS 489 

gigantic rivers, though the Mississippi and St. Law- 
rence are not equal in volume to the Amazon and the 
Parana. The shores of both are washed by mighty- 
ocean currents, but while the Gulf Stream warms the 
east coast of the northern, the Antarctic current chills 
the west coast of the southern, continent. 1 Their cli- 
mates are so far similar that in both the east side of the 
continent receives more rain than the west, but South 
America, having its greatest breadth in the tropics, lies 
more largely within the torrid zone. 

It is, however, with the settlement and subsequent 
history of the two continents that the real interest of 
the comparison begins. There are three remarkable 
points of similarity, but the points of difference are 
more numerous and instructive, and, in noting them, 
we shall see how potent each point of difference has 
been in directing the course of events and in forming 
the character of the communities that have grown up. 

The points of similarity are these. Both continents 
were when discovered inhabited by races entirely unlike 
those of Europe, who over the greater part of this area 
were in the savage state, but had in a few regions fa- 
voured by nature made some progress towards civiliza- 
tion. Both were conquered by Europeans, and easily 
conquered, owing to the superiority of the invaders in 
arms and discipline. The peoples of both (with one im- 

1 Each, has, moreover, other currents of somewhat less climatic 
importance : the Japan current on the Pacific and the Arctic current 
on the Atlantic coast of North America, as well as the equatorial 
current on a part of the east coast of South America. 



490 SOUTH AMERICA 

portant exception in the northern and three unimportant 
exceptions in the southern continent) ultimately revolted 
against the kingdoms whence the European part of their 
population had come and have ever since managed their 
own affairs as republics, seven republics in North, eleven 
in South America. 

Having noted these general resemblances in the 
fortunes of the two, let us enquire what were the differ- 
ences, natural and political, which made the lines of their 
subsequent development diverge. 

At this point, however, it is proper to leave off talk- 
ing of North and South America, for the southern part 
of the former continent belongs historically and to some 
extent physically also, to the latter continent. As Alex- 
andre Dumas said in writing of his journey to Spain, 
" Africa begins at the Pyrenees," — it is a saying which 
the Spaniards have never forgiven, — so we may say, 
"South America begins at the Rio Grande del Norte." 
Mexico and the states of Central America down to the 
Isthmus of Panama were parts of the Spanish colonial 
Empire, conquered, settled, and administered in much 
the same way as the still larger part of that Empire 
which lay farther south. We must, therefore, group 
the regions that once belonged to that Empire under 
the general name of Spanish, or, when it is desired to 
include Brazil (a Portuguese country), " Latin" Amer- 
ica, referring to the other parts of the northern conti- 
nent as " Teutonic America." 1 

1 Teutonic may appear to be no satisfactory term, considering not 
only the French-speaking population of eastern Canada, but also the 



THE TWO AMERICAS 491 

The aboriginal tribes with which the English and 
French came in contact when they settled the Atlantic 
coasts of North America were scattered over a vast 
wooded region, lived mainly by the chase, and had 
formed no habits of regular industry. They were 
mostly fierce fighters, proud and dogged, unwilling to 
bear any control, and it was found impracticable to 
make slaves of them, or use them for any kind of regu- 
lar labour. They were unfitted for it, and it would 
have cost the settlers more effort to compel the Indians 
to cut down trees and till the ground than to do the 
same things themselves. There was, accordingly, 
never any question of Indian slavery or serfdom, 
either on the Atlantic coasts or when the march of 
colonization advanced further inland, nor was there 
more than a scanty intermarriage between the settlers 
and the natives. 

Other reasons besides those connected with labour 
prevented any admixture in these regions of the white 
with the native races. There was little social inter- 
course, because the Indians, even the majority of the 
less warlike tribes of Virginia and the regions south 
of Virginia, were driven out, or retired, or died out. 
Their barbarous way of life drew a sharp line between 
them and the white intruders. The latter, moreover, 
brought their women with them, and had less tempta- 
tion to seek wives among the Indians. Thus it was only 

large Celtic, Italic, and Slavonic elements within the United States, 
Nevertheless, the general social type of that country and of Canada 
is Teutonic, as are also their institutions and their language. 



492 SOUTH AMERICA 

among the French voyageurs and trappers of the region 
round and beyond the Great Lakes that any mixed race 
grew up, half white, half Indian, and this race has now 
almost disappeared. 

In Spanish America, the case was quite different. 
Both in Mexico, in parts of Central America, and in 
Peru there was a large sedentary population of aborig- 
ines, cultivating the soil and trained to industry dur- 
ing many generations. The Conquerors immediately 
turned them into serfs, parcelling them out among 
the persons who received land grants, and who there- 
after lived on the produce of this semiservile labour. 
The result was that whereas in Teutonic America there 
grew up, slowly at first, a white agricultural population 
and ultimately a white manufacturing population also, in 
Spanish America agriculture was left almost entirely to 
the aborigines, and the pure white population increased 
hardly at all, because few new settlers came. There 
appeared, however, and that within two or three gen- 
erations, a considerable mestizo or half-breed popula- 
tion, which has come, after three centuries, to constitute 
most of the upper class and practically the whole of the 
middle class in all but two of the republics. 

This was the beginning of the divergent careers of the 
two sets of European colonists, Spaniards and English- 
men, a divergence which ultimately gave to the social 
system of each set its own peculiar structure. Two 
other circumstances helped to deepen the divergence. 
One was the hot climate of most parts of Spanish 
America, which made field labour, or, indeed, any kind 



THE TWO AMERICAS 493 

of manual labour, more distasteful to men of European 
stock than such labour was in the northern parts of 
Teutonic America. The same cause, it need hardly be 
said, had much to do with the importation of negroes 
on a vast scale into the southern parts of the British 
North American colonies. Such an expedient was less 
needed in Mexico and Peru, because they possessed (as 
already remarked) a native population that could be 
reduced to serfdom. In Spanish America, accordingly, 
all forms of labour connected with land were left by the 
European settlers to the natives, and no white peas- 
antry grew up. 

The other circumstance was that whereas in Teutonic 
America few or no mines were discovered or worked for 
a long time after the country had begun to be occupied, 
the Spaniards, having hit upon regions rich, some of 
them in gold, many of them in silver, began greedily 
to exploit this natural wealth and forced the natives to 
toil for them in this (to the native particularly odious) 
kind of work. The destruction of human life was terrible, 
but in those days life was little regarded. So was the 
slave-trade terrible in the deaths it caused and the suffer- 
ing it inflicted, but the conscience of England was not 
stirred against it till the end of the eighteenth century. 
The development of mining in Spanish America, im- 
mense for the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth 
centuries, when comparatively little was going on else- 
where, had many effects for Spain and for the world. 
For Mexico and Peru the most direct effect was to enrich 
a good many persons without any industrial efforts put 



494 SOUTH AMERICA 

forth by themselves, 1 and to lead the settlers as a whole 
to rely less upon agriculture than men did in the English 
colonies. A luxurious style of living established itself 
in the city of Mexico and in Lima, most unlike the frugal 
simplicity of Boston or Providence, or even of Phila- 
delphia or New York, in the eighteenth century. 

It has often been observed that whereas the men who 
went to the northern English colonies were mostly 
small farmers or townsfolk of the trading or artisan 
classes, the Spanish emigrants were mainly adventurers, 
making gold and silver their first object, the acquisition 
of plantations or mines to be worked by natives the 
second. This stamped on Spanish colonial society 
what can hardly be called an aristocratic character, 
for many of the emigrant-adventurers, like the Pizarro 
brothers, sprang from a humble social stratum, but 
yet a character which lacked both the sentiment of 
equality and a respect for industry. 

Not less marked than these social differences were 
those which belonged to the sphere of government and 
administration. The English colonies were for the 
most part left to govern themselves. Each had not 
only its colonial assembly, but also local assemblies for 
towns and counties, along with the English arrange- 
ments for securing justice in civil and criminal matters 
by juries. Even the governors sent out from England, 
where such there were, interfered but little with the 
power of the colonists to regulate their own affairs. The 

1 Although one-fifth of the produce was, as a rule, transmitted to 
the government at home. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 495 

Grown did occasionally assert its prerogative, but these 
instances and the resistance which arbitrary interven- 
tion evoked bear witness to the general adherence 
to the principles of local self-government. In the 
Spanish colonies, on the other hand, all power re- 
mained in the Crown, and was exercised either directly 
from Spain by ordinances made or orders issued there, 
or else through the viceroy or captain-general of each 
colony. Lucrative posts were reserved for persons of 
Spanish birth, who obtained them by court favour 
at home, or perhaps from a viceroy, who had brought 
them out in his suite. In the field of religion the 
contrast was even greater. Ecclesiastical power had 
in Spanish America been almost equal to civil. Al- 
though the Crown of Spain yielded less authority to 
the Pope in its transatlantic than it did in its European 
dominions, the church as a whole, archbishops and 
bishops, the Orders and the Holy Office, were, in 
America, an immense and omnipresent force, with whom 
even viceroys had to reckon, for their influence was great 
in the Court at home as well as over the minds and 
conduct of the colonists. Society was saturated with 
clericalism, and a taint of heterodoxy was more danger- 
ous than one of disloyalty. 

Putting all these things together, it can be seen how 
little in common Teutonic America and Spanish Amer- 
ica had when the colonial period ended for each of 
them by its severance from the mother country. They 
were, in fact, unlike in everything, except their position 
in the Western Hemisphere. Few, and far from friendly, 



496 SOUTH AMERICA 

had been their relations. There had been very little 
commercial intercourse but a great deal of fighting. 
English and American buccaneers and pirates — the 
two classes were practically the same — had been wont 
to prey upon Spanish colonial commerce and pillage 
Spanish colonial cities. There probably remained more 
aversion between the two races in America than in 
Europe, for in their hostility to France during the eigh- 
teenth century the people of Britain had almost for- 
gotten their hostility to Spain. To the New Englander 
or Virginian the colonial Spaniard had been a Papist and 
a persecutor, to the colonial Spaniard his neighbours 
on the north were pirates and heretics. 

What change was made by the two wars against the 
two mother countries and the independence which 
followed? It might have seemed likely that now, 
when both parts of the New World were disconnected 
from the Old and both had republican forms of govern- 
ment, they might begin to draw together. Indepen- 
dence, though it came nearly forty years later to Spanish 
America, made more difference there than it had done 
to the English colonies. Those who had been kept 
in leading strings by Spain were now left to their own 
devices. Ill-built and ill-steered had been the vessel 
that carried their fortunes, but now they began to 
drift and be tossed about with neither compass nor 
pilot. An era of civil wars and military revolutions 
set in, which lasted in Mexico nearly half a century, 
in Peru and Argentina still longer, and which seems to 
have become chronic in some of the more backward 



THE TWO AMERICAS 497 

states. While Teutonic America was making enor- 
mous strides in population and prosperity, intestine 
strife checked all progress, educational and material, 
in the Spanish lands during two generations. It is to 
the last thirty years of the nineteenth century that the 
development of Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay 
belongs. After the Latin-American countries had be- 
come independent, there was no more commercial 
intercourse between them and the United States than 
there had been in colonial days and no more commu- 
nity of feeling. Warm sympathy had been expressed by 
the latter with the colonies in their struggle against 
Spain, and the declaration made by John Quinsy Ih-^ 
Adams in concert with the English George Canning 
against any interference by the Holy Alliance to support 
the cause of monarchy in the New World, was gratefully 
welcomed by the insurgents. But no friendship between 
English-speaking and Spanish-speaking men grew up, 
and the war of the United States against Mexico in 1846, 
undertaken not so much because there were grievances 
against Mexico as from a desire to extend the area of 
slavery in the United States, and strengthen the Slave 
Power itself, exposed United States policy to suspicions 
that sank deep into the Spanish-American mind. 

From this consideration of the past relations of the two 
American continents, let us return to the divergence of 
their fortunes. At the time of the Discovery, the regions 
which passed under the rule of Spain were richer, more 
advanced in the arts of life, and far more populous than 
those whose settlement began with the expeditions of 
2k 



498 SOUTH AMERICA 

Champlain and Raleigh. We have no data for guessing 
at the population of the New World either in 1500 or in 
1600, but at both dates there evidently were in Mexico 
and Central America far more inhabitants than in all the 
rest of the Northern Continent taken together. As re- 
gards South America, the empire of the Incas alone prob- 
ably contained from nine to eleven millions 1 of persons, a 
number many times greater than that of all the aborig- 
ines that at any one time dwelt between the Arctic 
circle and the Gulf of Mexico. Even in 1800 the popula- 
tion of Mexico alone, without counting South America, 
was far larger than that of the United States and Canada. 
But from 1810, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies 
began, down till 1860, the growth of those colonies was 
slow, and in some there was even retrogression. Mean- 
while the United States, and latterly, Canada also, have 
been advancing with unexampled speed, so that now 
their population, about 108 millions, far exceeds that of 
all the Spanish republics in both continents. The 
hotter countries were at one time more populous than 
the temperate; now the reverse holds. If we regard 
wealth, there is, of course, no comparison at all between 
Teutonic America, as it stands to-day, and the southern 
regions. Yet Spain was long supposed to have got by 
far the best parts of the New World, not so much because 
they had tropical productiveness, as in respect of the 
quantity of the precious metals they contained. The 

1 See as to Peru, which was only the central part of that Empire, 
the figure of 8,000,000, given for 1575, after the great slaughter 
of the Spanish Conquest (pp. 162-163). 



THE TWO AMERICAS 499 

economic change from the sixteenth century to the 
twentieth which the progress of natural science and 
mechanical invention has brought about can hardly 
be better illustrated than by the changed importance 
which coal, iron, and copper have for our time when 
compared with that which gold and silver had in the 
days of Charles the Fifth. 

When the North American colonies separated from 
England, they were a small nation of less than three 
millions on the Atlantic coast. Thence they spread out 
over the vast space beyond the Alleghany Mountains, 
then across the Mississippi, finally over the Rocky 
Mountains to the Pacific, remaining one nation over 
a territory thirty times greater than that which had 
been actually settled at the time of the Revolution. 
The same process happened later and on a smaller scale 
in the dominion which remained to England in the north. 
The Canadians have spread out from the banks of the 
St. Lawrence to Vancouver Island, also remaining one 
people. Thus Teutonic America now consists of two 
nations only. 1 How different the fate of the Spanish 
colonies. Scattered over a space eight thousand miles 
long from San Francisco to Magellan's Straits, in days 
before railways existed and with even steam navigation 
in its infancy, they did not think of trying to maintain 

1 Had the Slave States succeeded in dissociating themselves from 
the northern and western Free States in the Civil War of 1861-1865, 
there would have been at least three. It may be suggested that if 
there had been neither steamships nor railroads, the Pacific slope 
of North America (California, Oregon, and Washington) might 
possibly have become the home of yet another independent nation. 



500 SOUTH AMERICA 

political connection across vast distances, and natu- 
rally fell apart into many independent states, roughly 
corresponding to the administrative divisions of colonial 
days. The number of these states has varied from 
time to time. At present there are six on the North 
American continent, and ten on the South American, 
without counting Portuguese Brazil and the three 
island republics of Cuba, San Domingo, and Hayti. 
Out of the lands that obeyed Charles the Fifth, nine- 
teen states have grown, all (except Hayti) speaking 
Spanish, while the English-speaking peoples are but 
two. Although the size of the territory occupied by 
these nineteen is the primary cause of this multiplication 
of small nations, there are other causes, also, political and 
social, which have been discussed in an earlier chapter. 1 
One bond of union they had, one solid basis of common 
sentiment which, nevertheless, did not avail to hold 
them together. They all professed the Roman Catholic 
faith and all obeyed one spiritual sovereign at Rome, 
whereas among the men of English speech in Teu- 
tonic America there were, and are, not only many 
Roman Catholics, but also among the larger mass of 
Protestants many forms of Protestantism, and no com- 
mon ecclesiastical authority at all. 

This summary review of the causes which have made 
the currents of Spanish-American and Teutonic- American 
history run in different and divergent channels may be 
closed by enquiring what the two divisions of the New 
World have in common to-day. 

1 Chapter XII. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 501 

They are alike in being (always excepting Canada) 
republican in the outward forms of their governments; 
that is to say, there is nowhere any official called a 
king. How far the governments of most Spanish- 
American states are from being republican in spirit 
and working everybody knows. To most men's minds, 
however, the form means a great deal. In Spanish 
America itself people who acquiesce in transitory dic- 
tatorships would be horrified at the idea of a hereditary 
sovereign, however constitutional. And there are still 
many people in the United States who find some virtue 
in the mere name of republic. 

The two divisions are also alike in belonging to a New 
World; that is to say, they have shaken loose from many 
ideas and habits that belonged, and still more or less be- 
long, to the Old World of Europe. Spanish America has 
done this more completely than has Teutonic America, 
because even in colonial days the ties of thought and 
feeling which bound the colonists to Spain were really 
less strong than those which connected the English of the 
United States with their mother country, and because 
the latter were, when the separation came, in a higher 
stage of institutional and intellectual development. The 
most signal instance of the general American breach 
with the Old World is the sense of social equality that 
now prevails alike in the English-speaking and the Span- 
ish-speaking peoples. The forms in which this sense 
appears are not quite the same. Among the Spanish 
Americans there is more external deference on the part 
of the humbler to the higher placed, and the pure Indian 



502 SOUTH AMERICA 

is treated, and submits to be treated, as a social inferior 
In Chile, for instance, the roto, or half-breed peasant, 
stands far more distinctly below the landowner than 
the North American day labourer stands below his em- 
ployer; though it is his ignorance, not his mixed blood, 
that assigns this position to him. But in both conti- 
nents the complete absence of any artificial and formal 
distinctions of rank is in striking contrast to the habits 
and ideas that still hold in most parts of Europe. ! 

It must be added that these republics of the West 
have, politically regarded, one important common char- 
acteristic. They constitute what German historians 
call a " States-System" of their own; i.e. they take no 
part in the politics of the Old World, but only in those 
of the New. This is no longer true as respects the United 
States, for though they do not interfere in questions purely 
European, and have touched those of Africa only slightly 
in the Congo, and more effectively in Liberia, which, in- 
deed, they called into being, they have, by conquering 
the Philippine Islands, made themselves an Asiatic power, 
and by annexing Hawaii and one of the Samoan Islands, 
a Pacific power. Latin-American republics, however, 
have (so far as I know) intervened neither in European 
nor in Asiatic affairs, being content to attend strictly to 
their own business, which is sufficiently absorbing. 

Latin America consists of two separate state-systems. 
One includes Mexico and the five small Central Amer- 

1 There are no titles of nobility in use in Jjatin America, except in 
Brazil, where a very few families still have the titles of Viscount 
and Baron. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 503 

ican republics, two of which, Costa Rica and Salvador, 
are peaceful within and seldom embroiled abroad, while 
the other three have had more chequered careers. 
Members of this group have had plenty to do with 
the United States, but seldom come into contact 
with the South American countries. The little republic 
of Panama, which is virtually under the protection of the 
United States, may now be deemed a " buffer state," be- 
tween Colombia and the republics to the north, nor does 
any Central American republic possess a navy. The 
larger group is composed of the eleven South American 
states. It presents some analogies to the Europe of 
the eighteenth century in which there were several great 
powers " playing the great game" against one another 
and against the smaller powers, nominally in the interest 
of that so-called Balance of Power which was to pre- 
vent any one from dominating the others, but often in 
reality for the sake of appropriating territory, when- 
ever a dynastic pretext could be found. In this group 
there are three great powers, Argentina, Brazil, and 
Chile; and when these three stand together, they can 
keep all the rest quiet, especially if (as they may usu- 
ally expect) the United States throws its influence into 
the scale of peace. At present these three are tolerably 
friendly, and there is no reason why they should not 
remain so. Between them there exist no longer such 
territorial controversies as disturb the repose of Ec- 
uador, Colombia, and Peru. 1 The politics of South 

1 One question exists which might possibly create friction between 
Argentina and Brazil, but there is reason to believe that any colli- 
sion will be avoided. 



504 SOUTH AMERICA 

America present an interesting field for study, but it 
is one upon which I cannot now and here enter. 

Some publicists have suggested that troubles might 
arise to affect South America from without if Japan or 
China were to insist on flooding her with their emi- 
grants, and that if this were attempted against one of 
the weaker South American republics, either the greater 
South American Powers, or the United States, or both, 
might be tempted to intervene. There are at present 
some Chinese and a very few Japanese on the Pacific 
coast, but no more seem to have been arriving in recent 
years. Any danger of this nature seems remote and 
improbable. 

With these three things, however, — republican forms, 
social equality, and detachment from European poli- 
tics, — the list of the things which the two Americas 
have in common ends. Far more numerous and more 
important are the points in which they stand con- 
trasted. 

Many causes have gone to the making of the contrast. 
Race and religion, climate and history have all had their 
share. The contrast appears both in ideas and in 
temperament. The Spanish American is more proud 
and more sensitive to any slight. He is not so punc- 
tilious in his politeness as is the Spaniard of Europe, 
and is, indeed, in some countries a little brusque or 
offhand in manners and speech. But he feels a slight 
keenly ; and he knows how to respect the susceptibilities 
of his fellow-citizens. I will not say that he is more 
pleasure-loving than the North American, for the latter 



THE TWO AMERICAS 505 

has developed of late years a passion for amusement 
which would have startled his Puritan ancestors. But 
he is less assiduous and less strenuous in work, being, 
in this respect, unlike the immigrant who comes from Old 
Spain, especially the Asturian and the Gallego, who is the 
soul of thrift and the steadiest of toilers. He is not so 
fond of commercial business, nor so apt for it, nor so eager 
to " get on " and get rich. The process of money making 
has not for him that fatal attraction which enslaves so 
many capable men in the United States and (to a less 
degree) in England and Germany, leading them to forget 
the things that make life worth living, till it is too late 
in life to enjoy them. In South America things are 
taken easily and business concerns are largely in the 
hands of foreigners. The South American — and here 
I include the Mexican — is an excitable being and prone 
to express his feelings forcibly, having absorbed from 
the Indians none of their stolid taciturnity. He is gen- 
erally good natured and hospitable, and responds quickly 
to anything said or done which shews appreciation of 
his country and its ways. Private friendship or family 
relationship have a great effect on his conduct, and 
often an undue effect, for one is everywhere told that 
the difficulty of securing justice in these republics lies 
not so much in the corruptibility of judges, as in their 
tendency to be influenced by personal partiality. 
Things go by favour. 

These contrasts of temperament between North and 
South Americans give rise to different tastes and a 
different view of life, so that, broadly speaking, the 



506 SOUTH AMERICA 

latter are not "sympathetic" either to the former or to 
Englishmen. 1 To say that they are antipathetic 
would be going too far, for there is nothing to make un- 
friendliness, nor, indeed, is there any unfriendliness. 
But both North Americans and Englishmen are built on 
lines of thought and feeling so different from those which 
belong to South Americans that the races do not draw 
naturally together, and find it hard to appreciate 
duly one another's good qualities. 2 

The use of nicknames has a certain significance. In 
South America a North American or Englishman is 
popularly called a "Gringo," as in North America a 
person speaking Italian or Spanish or Portuguese is 
vulgarly called a "Dago." Neither term has any eulo- 
gistic flavour. 

Thus we return to the question whence we started, 
and ask again whether there is any sort of unity or 
community in the two Americas. Are the peoples of 
these continents a group by themselves, nearer to one 
another than they are to other peoples, possessing 
a common character, common ties of interest and 
feeling? Or does the common American name mean 

1 One is told, but I had no means of verifying the statement, 
that Scotchmen and Irishmen and Germans get on rather better with 
the Latin Americans. 

2 In a remarkable speech made in New York in 1909, a speech 
which shewed his comprehension of the. good points of Spanish- 
American character, Mr. Root deplored the fact that the North 
American press was apt to indulge in criticisms of Spanish Amer- 
icans displeasing to the latter, the effect of which their authors, 
accustomed to criticise their own fellow-countrymen freely, did not 
realize. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 507 

nothing more than mere local juxtaposition beyond the 
Atlantic ? Is it, in fact, anything more than a historical 
accident ? 

The answer would seem to be that Teutonic Ameri- 
cans and Spanish Americans have nothing in common 
except two names, the name American/and the name 
Republican. In essentials they differ as widely as 
either of them does from any other group of peoples, 
and far more widely than citizens of the United States 
differ from Englishmen, or than Chileans and Argen- 
tines differ from Spaniards and Frenchmen. 

Nevertheless, juxtaposition has induced contact, 
though a contact which we shall find to have been rather 
political than intellectual or social. It is worth while 
to examine the attitude of each to the other. 

When the Spanish colonies revolted 1 against the 
Crown of Spain, the sympathy of the United States 
went out to them profusely, and continued with them 
throughout the war and long after. Their victories 
were acclaimed as victories won for freedom and for 
America, and children were called after the name of 
Simon Bolivar, whose exploits in Venezuela had early 
fixed upon him the attention of the world, and have 
given him a fame possibly beyond his merits. 

The struggling colonists were cheered by this as by the 
similar sympathy that came to them from England. 
They were, as already observed, grateful for the support 

1 In some of the colonies the revolt was at first rather on behalf 
of the Spanish king against the Napoleonic government in Spain, 
but the movement everywhere soon passed into one for independence. 



508 SOUTH AMERICA 

given them by the diplomacy of Canning and John 
Quincy Adams, and when they framed their constitu- 
tions, took that of the United States for their model. 
Their regard for the United States, and confidence in 
its purposes, never quite recovered the blow given by the 
Mexican War of 1846 and the annexation of California ; 
but this change of sentiment did not affect the patronage 
and good-will extended to them by the United States, 
whose people, and for a time the English Whigs also, 
maintained their touching faith that countries called 
republics must needs be graced by republican virtues 
and were entitled to favour whenever they came into 
collision with monarchies. This tendency of mind, 
natural in the days when the monarchies of continental 
Europe were more or less despotic, has begun to die 
down of late years, as educated men have come to look 
more at things than at names, and as United States 
statesmen found themselves from time to time annoyed 
by the perversity or shiftiness of military dictators 
ruling Spanish- American countries. The big nation 
has, however, generally borne such provocations with 
patience, abusing its strength less than the rulers of 
the little ones abuse their weakness. For many years 
after the achievement by the Spanish colonies of their in- 
dependence, a political tie between them and the United 
States was found in the declared intention of the latter 
to resist any attempt by European Powers either to 
overthrow republican government in any American state 
or to attempt annexation of its territory. So long as any 
such action was feared from Europe, the protection thus 



THE TWO AMERICAS 509 

promised was welcome, and the United States felt a 
corresponding interest in their clients. But circum- 
stances alter cases. To-day, when apprehensions of the 
old kind have vanished, and when some of the South 
American states feel themselves already powerful, one 
is told that they have begun to regard the situation 
with different eyes. "Since there are no longer rain- 
clouds coming up from the east, why should a friend, 
however well-intentioned, insist on holding an umbrella 
over us ? We are quite able to do that for ourselves if 
necessary." In a very recent book by one of the most 
acute and thoughtful of North American travellers, there 
occurs a passage which presents this view : — 

' ' Many a Chileno and Argentino resents the idea of our 
Monroe Doctrine applying in any sense to his country 
and declares that we had better keep it at home. He 
regards it as only another sign of our overweening 
national conceit: and on mature consideration it does 
seem as though the justification for the doctrine both in 
its original and in its present form had passed. Europe 
is no longer ruled by despots who desire to crush the 
liberties of their subjects. As is frequently remarked, 
England has a more democratic government than the 
United States. In all the leading countries of Europe 
the people have practically as much to say about the 
government as they have in America. There is not the 
slightest danger that any European tyrant will attempt 
to enslave the weak republics of this hemisphere. Fur- 
thermore, such republics as Mexico, Argentina and 
Brazil, Chile, and Peru, no more need our Monroe 



510 SOUTH AMERICA 

Doctrine to keep them from being robbed of their 
territory by European nations, than does Italy or Spain. 
If it be true that some of the others, like the notoriously 
lawless group in Central America, need to be looked 
after by their neighbours, let us amend our outgrown 
Monroe Doctrine, as already suggested by one of our 
writers on International Law, so as to include in the 
police force in the Western Hemisphere those who have 
shown themselves able to practise self-control." l 

There is truth in this. The talk often heard in the 
United States about the Doctrine has injured and is 
injuring her influence in South America. It excites 
suspicion and alarm. It is taken to imply an intent to 
claim a sort of protectorate over the other American 
republics, than which nothing could more offend Spanish- 
American sentiment. The wisest among American 
foreign ministers, such as Mr. Hay and Mr. Root, are 
those who have least frequently referred to the Doc- 
trine. To examine this subject, however, would lead 
me into the field of politics, and with politics I have 

1 Mr. Hiram Bingham in Across South America, published in 1911. 
Mr. Bingham adds in the same connection : " The number of 
' North Americans ' in Buenos Aires is very small. While we have 
been slowly waking up to the fact that South America is something 
more than ' a land of revolutions and fevers,' our German cousins 
have entered the field on all sides. The Germans in southern 
Brazil are a negligible factor in international affairs, but the well- 
educated young German who is being sent out to capture South 
America commercially is a power to be reckoned with. He is going 
to damage England more truly than dreadnoughts or airships." 
See also the judicious remarks of Mr. Albert Hale in his book, The 
South Americans, pp. 303-309. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 511 

nothing to do, seeking only to indicate the influences of 
interest, of intellectual affinity, and of temperamental 
sympathy which draw the peoples of Spanish America 
towards one or other of the great peoples of the North- 
ern Hemisphere. 1 

As regards the United States there is a balance be- 
tween attraction and suspicion. The South Americans 
desire good relations, and recognize the value of her 
diplomatic action in trying to preserve peace between 
those of their republics whose smouldering enmities 
often threaten to burst into flame. On the other hand, 
as already observed, they are jealous of their own 
dignity, not at all disposed to be patronized, and quick 
to resent anything bordering on a threat, even when 
addressed, not to themselves, but to some other re- 
public. It is as the disinterested, the absolutely dis- 
interested and unselfish, advocate of peace and good 
will, that the United States will have most influence in 

1 The idea of bringing all American republics together in congresses 
to discuss matters of common interest, was started by Bolivar with 
the view of organizing joint resistance to any action by the Holy 
Alliance against the new republics. At his instance such a gathering 
met at Panama in 1826. Delegates met again in 1883 at Caracas 
and Buenos Aires, but accomplished nothing. In 1899 a more largely 
attended gathering assembled at Washington, the chief result of 
which was the establishment there of an institution, now called the 
Pan-American Union, which under its zealous and energetic director 
collects, publishes, and distributes information, chiefly statistical 
and commercial, regarding the various republics. Similar congresses 
have been subsequently held at Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos 
Aires, at which friendly sentiments have been interchanged, but no 
encouragement has been given to suggestions proceeding from the 
United States for reciprocal " Pan-American " trade preferences. 



512 SOUTH AMERICA 

the Western Hemisphere, and that influence, gently and 
tactfully used, may be of incalculable service to mankind. 

The matters in which these republics are wont to 
imitate or draw lessons from the United States are 
education, especially scientific and technical education, 
and engineering. Of the influence upon their constitu- 
tions of the North American Federal Constitution I 
have already spoken. Their publicists continue to 
follow with attention the decisions given upon the 
application of its principles to new conditions as they 
arise, and attach value to the opinions of North Ameri- 
can international jurists. Otherwise, there is little 
intellectual affinity, and still less temperamental sym- 
pathy. The South Americans do not feel that the 
name " American" involves any closer community or 
co-operation with the great Teutonic republic of the 
north than it does with any other people or peoples. 
They are just as much a race or group of peoples stand- 
ing by themselves as if the lands they occupy had 
been that entirely detached continent out in the southern 
seas, supposed to lie far away from all other continents, 
to which the name of Amerigo Vespucci was first applied. 

With whom, then, have the Spanish Americans real 
affinities of mental and moral constitution ? With the 
peoples of southern Europe. • If anyone likes to call 
them the " Latin " peoples, 1 there is no harm in the term 

1 In the days when Louis Napoleon was trying to establish for 
France a hegemony over the Romance-speaking peoples of Europe, 
the days when his Life of Julius Ccesar was published and his expe- 
dition to Mexico despatched, this term first came into common use. 
It was the fashion for his literary court to represent the French 
people as the heirs of ancient Rome, the modern perpetuator of her 



THE TWO AMERICAS 513 

so long as it does not seem to ignore the fact that there 
exist the greatest differences between Italians and 
Frenchmen and Spaniards, for whoever has studied 
the history and the literature of those peoples knows 
that it is only the existence of still more marked differ- 
ences between them and the Teutonic peoples that 
makes them seem to resemble one another. 

It might be supposed that the relations of the Spanish 
Americans would be most close with their motherland, 
Old Spain. But these relations are not intimate, and 
have never been so since the War of Independence. 
Even in those old colonial days when the ports were 
closed to all but Spanish vessels, in order to stop all 
trade, export and import, except with the mother coun- 
try, the days when Englishmen and Dutchmen were de- 
tested as heretics, and Frenchmen as dangerous rivals, 
there was an undercurrent of anti-Spanish feeling. It 
was chiefly due to the practice of reserving all well- 
paid posts for natives of Spain. The criollos, as they 
were called, men born in the colonies, were naturally 
envious of the strangers, and resented their own ex- 
clusion and disparagement. They suffered in many 
ways, economic as well as sentimental, both from laws 
issued in Spain and from authority exercised on the spot 
by men from Europe who did not share their sentiments, 
treated them as socially inferior, and flouted their local 

spirit and her greatness. Yet in reality the character and the 
conduct of the English government during the eighteenth and nine- 
teenth centuries bear a closer resemblance than ever did the French, 
both in their strong and in their weak points, to the government of 
the Roman republic. 
2l 



514 SOUTH AMERICA 

opinion. Accordingly, when the separation came, there 
was less sense of the breaking of a family tie than there 
had been among the North American colonists in the 
earlier stages of their revolution. This antagonism to 
Spanish government was, of course, accentuated and 
envenomed by the long duration of the struggle for 
independence, which in Peru lasted for fifteen years, and 
in the course of which many severities were exercised 
by the governors and generals who fought for the Crown. 
As for the Indians, the oppressions they suffered and the 
memory of the hideous cruelties with which the rebel- 
lion of Tupac Amaru was suppressed, made the name 
of Spain hateful to them. After the flag of Castile had 
ceased to fly anywhere on the continent, and the last 
Spanish officials had departed, there were few occasions 
for communication of any kind. Spain herself was in 
a depressed and distracted state for many years after 
1825. There is to-day little trade between her and 
the New World, nor is there, except to Mexico and 
Argentina, any large Spanish immigration. Where 
it does exist, it is valued, for the men who come from 
northern Spain (as most settlers do) are of excellent 
quality. 

Family ties between colonists and the motherland 
had, moreover, become few or loose. Seldom in Span- 
ish America does one hear anyone speak of the place 
his ancestors came from, as one constantly hears North 
Americans talk of the English village where are the 
graves of their forefathers. Seldom do South Americans 
or Mexicans seem to visit Spain, either to see her an- 



THE TWO AMERICAS 515 

cient cities and her superb pictures or to study her pres- 
ent economic problems. They do not feel as if they 
had much to learn from her governmental methods, 
and her modern literature has apparently little message 
for them. For the Spanish Americans there seems to 
be no Past at all earlier than their own War of Inde- 
pendence. In all these respects the contrast between 
the position of Spain towards South America and that 
of Britain towards North America strikes an English- 
man with surprise. If that revival in Spanish litera- 
ture and art, of which there have recently been signs, 
should continue, and if Spanish commerce should de- 
velop, the position may change, for the tie of language 
will always have its importance. 

I may add in this connection that among the edu- 
cated classes of Spanish America one finds few signs of 
that sort of interest in the history of Old Spain which 
the best North Americans take in the history of Eng- 
land. The former have no link of free institutions 
brought from the old soil to flourish in a new one. Is 
it because the Conquistadores were Spaniards, or be- 
cause many of their deeds shock modern consciences, 
or because it is felt that to honour them would be an 
offence to Indian sentiment, faint as that sentiment is 
in Mexico and still fainter in Peru, that there are in 
Spanish America no statues or other honorific memo- 
rials of these brilliant and terrible figures? Even the 
statue of Queen Isabella the Catholic, which stood in 
Havana, was shipped back to Spain after the inde- 
pendence of Cuba had been declared in 1898. There 



516 SOUTH AMERICA 

is no monument to Cortes in Mexico, nor to Pizarro in 
Lima, nor (so far as I know) any statue of any of his 
companions except one of Pedro de Valdivia, set up on 
the hill of Santa Lucia in Santiago, where he built his 
fort and founded the capital of Chile. On the other 
hand, Cuahtemoc or Guatemozin, the last of the Aztec 
kings, 1 has a fine statue in the park that lies between 
the city of Mexico and the castle palace of Chapultepec, 
and the name of Caupolican, the Araucanian chieftain 
whom the Spaniards shot to death with arrows, like St. 
Sebastian, is about to be commemorated by a chari- 
table foundation at Temuco in Chile. 

Between Italy and Latin America there never were 
any direct relations except, of course, ecclesiastical rela- 
tions with Rome, until in recent years Italian immigrants 
began to pour into Argentina and southern Brazil. As 
many of these go backwards and forwards, and as swift 
lines of ocean steamers have been established between 
Buenos Aires and the ports of Italy, there is now a good 
deal of intercourse, but this has not so far led to any 
closer connection either political or intellectual. The 
Italian immigrants belong almost entirely to the scantily 
educated classes, and have brought with them little that 
is Italian except their language and their habits of in- 
dustry. If, however, the Italians, who, in Argentina, are 
now nearly one-third of the population, do not too 
quickly lose their language and become assimilated to 
the native Argentines, these people may not only form 
an intellectual link between their old home and their new 
1 Cortes tortured him to compel the disclosure of treasure. 



THE TWO AMERICAS 517 

one, but may give an impetus to the progress of art and 
music, perhaps of literature also. 

With England and Germany the commercial relations 
of most of the South American countries are close and 
constant. Nearly £300,000,000 sterling of British 
capital ($1,500,000,000) have been invested in railroads 
and otherwise in Argentina alone, besides very large 
sums in Uruguay, Brazil, and some of the lesser coun- 
tries. Many Englishmen own ranches or farms in 
Argentina. Germans have done less in railroad con- 
struction and in the acquisition of landed properties, 
but they run lines of ocean steamers, and a great part 
of the commerce of the more progressive republics is 
now in their hands. They take more pains than do the 
English to master Spanish and understand the customs 
of the land. The German army and its arrangements 
are taken as a model for South American ministers and 
officers to follow, and a like deference is paid to the 
British navy and its methods. Upon thought and art 
and taste, however, neither of these countries exerts 
much influence. Though a certain number of Argen- 
tines, Chileans, and Brazilians can read English and 
a smaller number German, and though statesmen and 
serious students appreciate the English political system 
and the German administrative system, and follow the 
scientific work done in both countries, books in these 
languages are not widely read. The members of the 
English and German colonies in seaports like Buenos 
Aires, Montevideo, Rio, and Valparaiso are personally 
liked and respected, but they have not done much to 



518 SOUTH AMERICA 

popularize the ideas and habits and tastes of their coun- 
tries. The mental quality and the views of life are 
essentially dissimilar. Between the peoples, there is 
little more than reciprocal good-will and what Thomas 
Carlyle calls the "cash nexus." English fashions are, 
however, followed in horse-racing and other branches 
of sport. 

There remains France. Her influence may be traced 
to several causes. Though the North American Revo- 
lution of 1775-1783 had suggested to the Spanish Amer- 
icans the idea of separation from their mother country, 
the French Revolution of 1789-1799 stirred their minds 
more deeply, and the literature produced in France, both 
before and during those years and still later, was the 
strongest and most novel intellectual force that had ever 
fallen on these previously backward countries, as well as 
upon those few colonists who visited Europe in the end 
of the eighteenth century. Severed by a violent shock 
from Spain, the Spanish Americans must needs turn 
elsewhere. French had for a century been the one 
foreign language which was learnt by men who learnt 
any foreign language. Whoever travelled to Europe 
needed it and the similarity of its vocabulary to their 
own made it easier for them than any Teutonic tongue. 
With England there was in those days very little in- 
tercourse, with Germany and the United States still less, 
for commerce was insignificant. Thus French estab- 
lished itself as what might be called the gateway to 
European thought. French literature has, moreover, a 
double attraction for the South Americans, including 



THE TWO AMERICAS 519 

the Brazilians. It gratifies their fondness for graceful 
and pointed and rhetorical expression. Spaniards, like 
Frenchmen, love style, and French style has for them a 
peculiar charm. With a great liking for what they call 
" general ideas" they set less store by an accumulation 
of facts and an elaborate examination of them than do the 
Germans or the English, and prefer what may be called 
the French way of treating a subject. In short, they 
have an intellectual affinity for France, for the bright- 
ness of her ideas, the gaiety of her spirit, the finish 
of her literary methods, the quality of her sentiment. 

Then there is Paris. When South Americans began 
to be rich enough to travel to Europe and enjoy them- 
selves there, Paris became the Mecca of these pilgrims 
of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner, 
many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a 
Caribbean republic who, like Guzman Blanco of Vene- 
zuela, has drawn from the public revenues funds to in- 
vest in European securities, goes to the metropolis of 
fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. 
All the young literary men, all the young artists who 
can afford the journey, flock thither. There is a large 
South American colony in Paris, and through it, as 
well as through books and magazines, the French drama 
and art, French ideas and tastes dominate both the 
fashionable and the intellectual world in the cities of 
South America. The writers of France have often 
claimed that there is something in the " French spirit," 
in their way of thinking and their way of expressing 
thought, which, distinctive of themselves as it is, has, 



520 SOUTH AMERICA 

nevertheless, a sort of universality, or an adaptability 
to the minds of all men, that has more than once in 
history given it an empire such as no other modern 
literature has enjoyed. In and for South America 
this claim has been made good, for here French influ- 
ence reigns supreme. 

All this has, of course, no more to do with the political 
relations of these republics to foreign powers than has 
the ownership of Argentine railways by British share- 
holders. But it is a further illustration of the fact 
that South America has nothing in common with Teu- 
tonic North America beyond the name and the form 
(in some countries an empty form) of institutions called 
republican. She is much nearer to being an Ibero- 
Celtic West European group of nations, planted far out 
in the midst of southern seas. 

But can the South Americans really be classed 
among south or west European peoples? May they 
not be — if one can speak of them as a whole, ignor- 
ing the differences between Chileans, Argentines, and 
Brazilians — a new thing in the world, a racial group 
with a character all its own ? 

This is their own view of themselves. It would need 
more knowledge than I possess either to deny or to affirm 
it. They are all, except Argentines and Uruguayans, 
largely Indian or (in Brazil) African in blood. Even 
the Uruguayans and Argentines strike one as differing at 
least as much from Spaniards as North Americans differ 
from Englishmen. They give the impression of being 
still nations in the making, whose type or types, both 



THE TWO AMERICAS 521 

the common type of all Spanish America and the special 
types of each nation, will grow more sharp and definite 
as the years roll on and as life becomes for them more 
rich and more intense. 

When this happens and the world of a.d. 2000 rec- 
ognizes a definite South American type (or types), 
may there be thence expected any distinctively new 
contribution to the world's stock of thought, of litera- 
ture, of art ? Each nation is in the long run judged and 
valued by the rest of the world more for such contribu- 
tions than for anything else. There is a sense in which 
Shakespeare is a greater glory to England than the em- 
pire of India. Homer and Virgil, Plato and Tacitus 
are a gift made by the ancient world to all the ages, 
more precious, because more enduring, than any achieve- 
ments in war, or government, or commerce. The op- 
portunities for the growing up of new nations with 
creative gifts specifically their own seem to be getting 
few because the world is getting full ; there is no more 
room for new nations. 

That there is vitality and virility in the Spanish- 
American peoples appears from the number of strong, 
bold, forceful men who have figured in their history, 
including one the Mexican Juarez, of pure, and many 
of mixed, Indian blood. Few, indeed, have shewn that 
higher kind of greatness which lies in the union of large 
constructive ideas with uecisive energy in action, the 
Napoleonic or Bismarckian gift. In most of the re- 
publics, political conditions have been so unstable as to 
give little scope for constructive statesmanship. Still 



522 SOUTH AMERICA 

there is no want of vigour, and it is something to have 
produced in San Martin one truly heroic figure in whom 
brilliant military and political talents were united to a 
lofty and disinterested character. 

If Latin America has not yet produced any thinker 
or poet or artist even of the second rank, this will not 
surprise anyone who knows what was her condition 
before the War of Independence and what it has been 
from that time till recent years. Could any one of those 
ancient sages whom Dante heard in Limbo, speaking 
with voices sweet and soft, have been brought back to 
earth and permitted to survey Europe as it was in the 
welter of the tenth century, such an one might have 
thought that art and letters, as well as freedom and 
order, had forever vanished from the earth. Yet out 
of that welter what glories of art and letters were to 
arise. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE CONDITIONS OF POLITICAL LIFE IN SPANISH 
AMERICA 

It is not my purpose to describe or discuss either 
the political institutions or the practical politics of the 
South American states. Even with a fuller knowledge 
of them than I was able to acquire in the short time 
at my disposal it would have been difficult for me to 
treat of them with the requisite freedom. But that 
which a traveller who has been the recipient of many 
courtesies may do without offence, and that which 
even a limited knowledge may qualify him to do, 
is to present a summary account of those physical, 
economic, and social features of the South American 
countries which are the basis of its political life, and 
constitute the conditions under which that life has to 
be carried on. Whoever has seen and understands 
these, realizing how altogether different they are from 
those of any European country, will find himself able 
to judge the troubled history and the present pros- 
pects of these states more fairly than those can do who 
apply to them a West European or a North American 
standard. The maxim, "To comprehend everything is 
to pardon everything, " goes too far, but such truth as 
belongs to it is eminently applicable to these countries. 
One must know their conditions before attempting to 
pass judgment on £heir defects. 

523 



524 SOUTH AMERICA 

When republican governments sprang up on Central 
and South American soil as the authority of Spain was 
slowly swept away from one region after another, those 
governments were eagerly welcomed by European Lib- 
erals and still more effusively acclaimed by the people of 
the United States. The latter found in them a double 
source of satisfaction. Their appearance meant the dis- 
appearance of an old enemy, and their democratic institu- 
tions were a tribute of imitation to the success of popular 
government in the United States, where people still be- 
lieved that there could be no freedom under a monarchy. 
Though this sympathy of the North Americans long 
continued to be extended to the new republics, espe- 
cially when they came into collision with any European 
power, the friends of freedom in Europe presently 
lost interest in communities which were not reflecting 
credit upon democracy; and European writers of the 
opposite school soon began to point to them as shocking 
examples of liberty that had degenerated into license and 
violence. The last Spanish troops left the American 
continent in 1826. Decade after decade passed with 
no signs of improvement. Revolutions and dictators 
succeeded one another so quickly, and seemed to mean 
so little, that after a while the only Europeans who 
followed the fortunes of South America were the bond- 
holders whose loans remained unpaid. The financial 
credit as well as the political character of the new states 
fell very low. Newspapers ridiculed them. Conserva- 
tive statesmen and cloistered political philosophers 
drew warnings from them. Sir Henry Maine, one of 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 525 

the most brilliant writers of the last generation, in his 
ingenious, but elusive and unsatisfying, book on Popular 
Government, whenever he seeks to supply a link or 
point an epigram in his long indictment of democracy, 
constantly refers to the South American republics 
as instances of its failure in this or that respect. Yet 
such a line of argument is really no more legitimate 
than that of the enthusiastic North Americans who 
were prepared to defend the government of any South 
American country that called itself a republic. Both 
the assailant and the apologist looked only at the 
name, and did not stop to enquire into the thing. Sir 
Henry Maine's reasonings were valid against those 
who held, as did the North Americans, that the name of 
republic is enough to ensure good government, but valid 
against them only. There are always people ready to 
assume that things are what they are called, because 
it is much easier to deal with names than to examine 
facts . Paraguay under the military tyrannies of Francia 
and the elder and younger Lopez was called a republic 
and had a republican constitution. 1 The same was true 
of Venezuela under the tyrannies of Guzman Blanco and 
of Castro. 'Were Paraguay and Venezuela, therefore, 
true republics, entitled to the sympathy which democrats 
give to " governments deriving their just powers from 
the consent of the governed"? If they were, then 
arguments drawn from the misdeeds of Lopez and 
Castro are good arguments against the champions- of 
republican or democratic government. If they were 
1 Though Francia had been created dictator for life. 



526 SOUTH AMERICA 

not, then the sympathy felt by North Americans for 
these so-called republics is groundless, and the incidents 
of their history prove nothing either for or against de- 
mocracy. It is a mere question of names, and not of 
things. 

Throwing names aside, let us go to the facts. I shall 
have to speak of these states as republics, because they 
are so called, but the term is meant not to describe, 
but only to denote. Europeans have been wont until 
lately to lump all of them in a general condemna- 
tion. That was always unjust, and is still more unjust 
now than it was formerly. There is as great a differ- 
ence between the best and the worst of them as there 
is between the best and the worst of European monar- 
chies. Some of them are true republics in the European 
sense, countries in which the constitutional machinery is 
a reality and not a sham. Others are petty despotisms, 
created and maintained by military force. In the fairly 
large class which lies between these two groups, the 
machinery works, but more or less irregularly and im- 
perfectly. The legislature has some influence as an ex- 
pression of public opinion ; the rights of individuals to 
personal safety and to property receive some respect ; the 
application and enforcement of the law, though uncertain, 
are not subjected to the arbitrary will of the executive. 

To enquire into the causes which have determined 
the history of the Spanish-American states as a whole, 
and prevented them from realizing the hopes that 
gilded their birth ninety years ago, would be a long and 
serious undertaking, too large for this book. What 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 527 

may, however, be done concisely is to indicate the con- 
ditions under which independent political life had to 
begin in the lands that had thrown off the dominion 
of Spain. I will place these conditions in five classes : — 

I. Physical or geographical conditions. 

II. Racial conditions. 

III. Economic and social conditions. 

IV. Historical conditions belonging to the Colonial 
period. 

V. Historical conditions attending the struggle for 
independence. 

I. Physical Conditions. — In nearly all the republics 
the population was and is small in proportion to the area, 
and in most of them communication across this thinly 
peopled area is hindered by mountains or deserts or 
forests. Colombia, for instance, with a territory of 
435,000 square miles (more than twice the size of 
France) has only ten persons to the square mile (whereas 
France has nearly two hundred), and is so intersected by 
lofty and heavily wooded ranges that most parts of it are 
accessible only by long and difficult journeys along mule 
paths. Bolivia, three times the size of France, has only 
three and a half persons to the square mile, and its few 
towns, only one of which has more than twenty-five 
thousand inhabitants, are separated by long spaces of 
wilderness. Peru is cut up by the numerous chains of 
the Andes into narrow valleys, each of which has little 
intercourse with the others. In such countries — and 
this applies to nearly all of them — there is, and there 
can be, very little public opinion common to the nation, 



528 SOUTH AMERICA 

because the means of intercommunication are defective 
and slow. Officials representing the central government 
cannot easily be supervised or controlled. When local 
discontent exists, it may find no constitutional vent, 
because the legislature is distant and cannot be got to 
understand the situation. When a revolt breaks out, 
it may spread fast, and become formidable before any 
adequate force can be collected and despatched to 
the spot to suppress it. All these conditions also 
prevent the growth of a press capable of inform- 
ing and aiding the growth of opinion. Nothing but 
an efficient system of popular local self-government 
could secure good administration under such conditions, 
and the rule of such a public opinion as England and 
the United States possess becomes almost impossible, 
because people know little either of one another, or of 
current questions, or of the conduct of their representa- 
tives sent to the capital. Patriotism there may be, and 
passion may be excited far and wide over the country by 
some event touching the honour or the supposed inter- 
est of the nation, but there can hardly be that con- 
trolling influence of the whole people which is needed in 
free governments to keep the rulers steady and to im- 
press upon them a sense of responsibility. 

II. Racial Conditions. — It has been shewn in an 
earlier chapter that in all the republics, except 
Argentina and Uruguay, the native Indians and 
the mestizos form a large element in the population. 
In Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the pure 
Indians are a majority of the whole. In Chile the 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 529 

poorer class is practically all mestizo; in Venezuela and 
Colombia and Panama, there are few pure Europeans. 
Speaking little or no Spanish, the Indians constitute a 
practically distinct nation. They have nothing to do 
with the white people, except in so far as they pay rent 
or work for employers. By the constitution they are, 
in many states, citizens and have votes. But they 
have never heard of the constitution and they never 
think of voting, having, although free, no more to do 
with the government than the slaves had in the south- 
ern United States before the Civil War. 

Bolivia, though its population is not so preponderat- 
ingly aboriginal as that of Paraguay, furnishes a good 
instance. The Indians, mostly Aymaras, are either 
tillers of the soil, or engaged in the transportation of 
goods by mule or llama, or are artisans of the ruder 
sort. They are entirely illiterate. Nominally Catho- 
lics, their religion is the primitive spirit worship of 
their ancestors with a varnish of Christian forms and 
the cult of Christian saints. Politics are left entirely 
to a few Spaniards and mestizos living in four or five 
towns, each of which, in default of a common inter- 
est and general public opinion, is obliged to try to 
get as much as it can for itself. Thus, politically re- 
garded, the Bolivian nation of two millions shrinks to 
some thousands. A few thousands gathered into one 
city may give a vigorous life to a genuine republic, as 
happened in many a city of ancient Greece and mediae- 
val Italy; but where citizens are scattered over many 
thousands of square miles, without railways to bring 

2m 



530 SOUTH AMERICA 

them together and newspapers to convey the ideas of 
each group to the other, democratic government 
becomes scarcely possible. What all sections of such 
a population can do is to fight, for defects that unfit 
them to be voters do not unfit them to be soldiers. 
The aboriginal races of the central and northern 
Andes have not that love of fighting for its own 
sake which the Aztecs or the Araucanians had. 
But they have little fear of death and can be readily 
forced or tempted to swell the forces of a revolting 
general. Although in Venezuela, Colombia, and Pan- 
ama, the proportion of whites and mestizos is larger, 
the general result is the same, for the vast majority 
of the people are illiterate and qualified only for the 
fighting side of public life. 1 

Some may conceive that the racial facts of the coun- 
try are unfavourable in a further way. That an ad- 
mixture of the blood of a backward race must injure 
the white element, is a view which suggests itself nat- 
urally to European pride. There are even persons who 
assume that the Indo-European or so-called Aryan races 
are superior to others — a gratuitous assumption, for 
there are three non- Aryan races in Europe, the average 
members of which are equal in talent and character to 
the average members of the other peoples among whom 
they dwell. 2 It is, of course, possible that the Spanish 
race has suffered by intermarriage with Indians, but 

1 The wild tribal Indians, Indios bravos, have, of course, no votes. 

2 The Magyars of Hungary, the Finns of Finland, and the 
Basques of the western Pyrenees. 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 531 

who can tell how much of the difference between the 
Spaniards of Old Spain and those of Peru or Venezuela 
is due to blood, how much to climatic and other local 
conditions? One high Chilean authority thinks his 
countrymen all the better for having reinforced their 
stock from the hardy Indians of the south. 1 

There are also those who carry race disparagement 
still further and hold that the Spanish or " Iberian" 
races are unfitted for constitutional government, in 
company, it would appear, with the Celtic and Slavonic 
and all others except the favoured Teutons. This 
doctrine is not worth discussing, because it cannot be 
brought to any test of history, and it is history alone 
that enables us to test such theories. The collapse in the 
sixteenth century of that free constitutional govern- 
ment for which there seemed at one time to be almost 
as good a chance in Spain as there was in contemporary 
England, can be explained by causes altogether irre- 
spective of race. It is not in the hypothetical inferiority 
of any pure or any mixed race that the importance of 
race questions for South America lies, but in the fact 
that the existence in the same state of different races, 
speaking different languages, prevents that homogeneity 
and solidarity of the community which are almost 
indispensable conditions to the success of democratic 
government. 2 

1 Dr. Palaeios in his interesting book Raza Chilena. 

2 Remembering Switzerland with its three languages, one cannot 
make the proposition absolute. But in Switzerland the three races 
are, as respects intelligence and education, practically on a level, 
whereas in South America the Indians stand far below. 



532 SOUTH AMERICA 

III. Economic and Social Conditions. — Economic 
phenomena and social phenomena may be considered 
together, because the latter depend largely on the 
former. All the republics except Argentina, Chile, and 
Brazil, of which I shall speak presently, are poor coun- 
tries, not that natural resources are wanting, but that 
these have been so imperfectly developed as to bring 
little wealth to the native population. Almost the 
only fortunes made in them are made by foreigners 
or foreign companies who have got concessions for 
mines, or have bought plantations, because there 
is very little native capital and not much talent or 
experience to work mines or develop estates. 1 The 
land, it is true, belongs to large proprietors, but they 
do not form a class of men who, having a common and 
solid interest in the country, constitute a sort of natural 
aristocracy, concerned to preserve order, and make the 
government stable. Similarly, there is only a small 
native class of substantial business men, with a like 
interest in public tranquillity and good administra- 
tion. The want of local capital has left the larger 
industrial and financial enterprises to foreigners. It is 
better that the country should be developed by foreign 
capital than that it should not be developed at all, yet 
we may regret that what is gained in the way of experi- 
ence as well as of money is not gained for the people of 
the country. That which Europeans call a "lower 
middle class," composed of shopkeepers and skilled 
artisans, is small, and the towns in which it exists 

1 This was ceasing, under the rule of Diaz, to be true of Mexico. 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 533 

are so few and far apart from one another, that it 
has been hitherto a feeble political factor. Lastly, 
the agricultural population consists in some states 
largely, in others almost entirely, of those ignorant 
aborigines who have no sense of their interest in prog- 
ress or good government. The absence of that class 
of intelligent small landowners, which is the soundest 
and most stable element in the United States and in 
Switzerland, and is equally stable, if less politically 
trained, in France and parts of Germany, is a grave 
misfortune for South and Central America. What 
is wanting in these countries is a sufficient number of 
citizens who have no personal ends to secure, and noth- 
ing to get out of government, except good administra- 
tion, but whose interest in such administration is in- 
telligent enough and strong enough to rouse them to 
their civic duty. Public spirit and an active participa- 
tion in public lif e without the prospect of such private 
gains as professional politicians make out of politics, — 
that and nothing else is what provides in every country 
the public opinion needed to guide and control the ruling 
authorities of a state. 

It may be said that nowhere in the world can we 
expect ideal conditions for popular governments. Such 
governments have existed and have attained credit- 
able results in countries where both physical condi- 
tions and racial conditions might have seemed unfa- 
vourable, because the people possessed the gifts and the 
training that enable the rule of the people to succeed. 

Admitting this to be true, it raises the question 



534 SOUTH AMERICA 

whether those who were summoned to govern the new 
republics that emerged from the War of Independence 
did possess, and could have been expected to possess, 
the requisite gifts and the training. Such gifts are 
not natural. They are the result of a people's previous 
career and of experience gained therein. What, then, 
had been the history of the colonial dominion of Spain 
and what sort of practice in government had the Crown 
allowed to its Spanish-American subjects ? 

This brings us to a fourth branch of the enquiry, — 
viz. : — 

IV. Historical Conditions during the Colonial Period. 
— The Spanish Conquerors of the New World were men 
of extraordinary audacity and energy. No such for- 
cible individualities had been seen in the world since 
the Norsemen of the tenth century and their children, 
the Normans, of the eleventh. They were, however, 
loyally submissive to the Spanish Crown and never 
thought of asking for, or of setting up for themselves, 
any self-governing institutions. Neither did the Span-, 
ish Crown ever think of granting such institutions, 
Those which existed in Castile had just disappeared; 
but even had they continued, it is improbable that any 
idea of reproducing them in the colonies would have 
been entertained. The English Crown granted char- 
ters to the companies which undertook colonization 
in North America, and the settlers themselves were soon 
organized by counties in Virginia, by townships and 
counties in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Forms 
of local self-government more effective than those which 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 535 

then existed in England were in full working order in 
those colonies, all through the eighteenth century, until 
they separated from the mother country. But every- 
where in Spanish America the authority of the viceroy, 
or captain-general, or Audiencia and their subordinate 
officers, was paramount, and covered the whole field. 
There were no elected assemblies or elected officials. All 
power came from above; the people had nothing to do 
with administration, and were not enough permitted to 
subject it to public criticism. The only exception was 
furnished by the sort of muncipal council in the towns 
which was called a Cdbildo or Ayuntamiento, and the 
members of which, while in a few towns freely elected 
by the householders, or perhaps by the more sub- 
stantial householders, were in others nominated, and 
often nominated because they had bought the nomina- 
tion. The despotic power of a viceroy or other gov- 
ernor was, of course, restrained by the instructions 
he received and by the laws which the Crown enacted 
for the colonies, and to some extent also both by the ec- 
clesiastical magnates and by local sentiment. But there 
were no responsibilities devolved on the people, and no 
machinery in and by which they could acquire any train- 
ing in public affairs. In the English North American 
colonies the management of church affairs belonged to 
the laity as well as to the clergy ; and the New England 
Congregational churches in particular, founded on the 
principles of liberty, became direct exponents of popular 
feeling. In the Spanish colonies the Roman Church rep- 
resented the principle of authority, and impressed it on 



536 SOUTH AMERICA 

the minds of the laity by all the sanctions she possessed. 
All books and publications of every kind were subjected 
to a searching ecclesiastical censorship; and the right 
of freely expressing opinion either by speech or in 
writing was steadily denied. 

V. Historical Conditions at the Close of the War of 
Independence. — Thus, when the revolt from Spain threw 
all power into the hands of the people, the people were 
unfit to exercise it. It was easy to frame constitutions 
modelled on that of the United States. But who were 
the people and what did they know about the working of 
free governments ? What was the capacity of the citi- 
zens whose votes were to choose legislatures, and of what 
sort of persons were the legislatures to be composed ? 

Ten or twelve years of fighting against Spanish troops, 
years in which there had been many severities and cruel- 
ties perpetrated on each side, had accustomed everybody 
to violence and had made soldiers the only leaders. 
Everyone's mind was full of dreams of liberty, but no one 
knew how to secure it by coupling liberty with law. 
Even in the United States the first years after the ac- 
knowledgment of the independence of the thirteen 
colonies had been marked by so many errors and so much 
legislative weakness that the constitutional convention 
of 1787 was regarded by the wisest men of the time as 
a last chance for saving the nation. Yet the North 
American states were carrying on governments which 
had existed for several generations and following 
principles which their forefathers had established in 
England five centuries before. Small wonder that 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 537 

among the Spanish Americans, who had no experience 
at all in the most complicated of all human undertakings, 

— the conducting of government by the will of the 
majority, but according to settled law and with due 
respect to the rights of the minority, — small wonder 
that legislatures were not honestly elected, that, when 
elected, they wasted time in vain debates and neglected 
business, that each party in turn drove out its opponents 
or cowed them by violence, that debts were recklessly 
contracted and left unpaid, that the government re- 
mained one not of laws, but of men, and those men 
mostly military adventurers at the head of armed 
bands. 

The inhabitants, accustomed to be ruled by others in 
State and in Church, had never been given a chance of 
learning to think of government as their own business 
nor of themselves as responsible for public order. When 
a long and sanguinary war had destroyed the habit of 
obedience to constituted authority, they were remitted 

— constitution or no constitution — to that primitive 
state of things in which force prevails. There being 
often either no authority de iure, or one too feeble to 
protect those who appealed to it, authority de facto 
had to be recognized, and the notion of legal right and le- 
gal duty vanished. It must be remembered that these 
were small and scattered communities, in each of which 
there were but few men who were at once law-abiding 
and intelligent, able to impose some check on the parti- 
sans of one or the other of the adventurers who were fight- 
ing for power. The parties were usually factions follow- 



538 SOUTH AMERICA 

ing the banner of a particular chief. Only one set of 
controversies raising questions of principle emerged from 
time to time in one republic or another, those that 
turned on the property and claims of the Church. 
Other issues were usually either local or personal, sel- 
dom economic, hardly ever racial. 

Several thoughtful South Americans in the days of the 
Revolution perceived that their countries were not fit 
for democracy. The illustrious San Martin favoured 
a republican government based on a limited suffrage; 
and Bolivar himself desired to be life president of a 
confederation of states. Apart, however, from the diffi- 
culty of proposing constitutions which would have ex- 
cluded a large part of those whose arms had secured inde- 
pendence, the enthusiasm for liberty that prevailed and 
the rapturous belief that liberty was enough to secure 
peace and prosperity, prescribed democratic arrange- 
ments, and it was only in later struggles between rival 
parties that some leader would enact qualifications calcu- 
lated to exclude his opponents. Everywhere the system 
of vesting executive power in a president holding office 
for a term of years was adopted. It seemed the sim- 
plest plan, and was recommended by the example of the 
United States, but it set up a tempting prize for ambi- 
tion and generally led straight to dictatorship. Bad 
men abused it to enrich themselves or their friends, 
good men found that the quickest and possibly the only 
way to carry out the reforms which the country needed 
was to stretch their constitutional authority. High- 
minded and public-spirited rulers were not wanting, 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 539 

but they could not, with the best will in the world, create 
the materials for a true democracy. 

Whoever travels through these countries, — I include 
Mexico and Central America, but not Chile or Argen- 
tina, of which more anon, — and whoever, having thus 
obtained some knowledge of their physical and racial 
character, studies their history, finds himself driven 
to three conclusions. The first is that these states 
never have been democracies in any real sense of the 
word. The second is that they could not have been real 
democracies. To expect peoples so racially composed, 
very small peoples, spread over a vast area, peoples 
with no practice in self-government, to be able to create 
and work democratic institutions was absurd, though 
the experience which their history has furnished to the 
world was needed to demonstrate the absurdity. The 
third conclusion is that injustice is done to the Spanish 
Americans by censures and criticisms which ignore 
these fundamental facts. There is no more Original 
Sin among them than there is in other peoples. Many 
of their statesmen and generals were honest patriots, 
who loved liberty and sought to give their country as 
much liberty as it was capable of then receiving. It was 
neither their fault nor the fault of the people that the 
conditions then existing made real representative and re- 
sponsible government impracticable. The constitutions 
did not suit the facts, and the facts had to prevail against 
the constitutions, sometimes against their letter, usually 
against their spirit. When voters were obviously unfit 
to elect, and when fair elections could not be secured, 



540 SOUTH AMERICA 

it was not wonderful that power should be seized with- 
out legal title, or that an election should be so con- 
trolled by force or arranged and put through by fraud, 
that while the form of it was respected, it did not ex- 
press any popular will. When one party had done 
these things, the other party repeated the process as 
soon as it had a chance, and thereafter things moved 
round in the same vicious circle. 

Why does the machinery of constitutional government 
work smoothly in Switzerland and the United States 
and England ? Because its forms, being consecrated 
by tradition and supported by public opinion, are re- 
spected by the officials who have to work them. In 
these South American republics, there were no tradi- 
tions, and very little public opinion ; and this was due 
not to any inborn defects of the people, but to historical 
causes which had deprived them of such advantages as 
the Swiss possess and had given them constitutions quite 
unfitted to their case. 

If the democratic frames of government they adopted 
were unsuitable, what other frames would have been 
suitable? Bolivar desired a sort of elective life mon- 
archy, to be sure with himself as monarch. San 
Martin (as already observed) preferred an oligarchic 
republic. Either might have been better than what was 
actually taken. An "honest" oligarchy, i.e. one pro- 
fessing to be what it really is, may be — doubtless is — 
better than a sham democracy. In a country where 
only a minority — perhaps a small minority — of the 
citizens are capable of taking part in the government, 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 541 

it may be safer legally to recognize them as the gov- 
erning class, and thus bring theory into accord with 
facts, rather than that the divergence of facts from 
theory should prove an irresistible temptation to force 
or fraud. This, however, remains matter for specula- 
tion, since no country has permanently established 
elective monarchy, and few have embodied oligarchical 
provisions in their constitutions. Let it be added that 
the better or worse political condition of these states 
has seldom turned upon the extent to which the suf- 
frage has been granted, for in those where violent 
methods prevail, the result would be the same whether 
the number of voting citizens were great or small. 

Although for the sake of conciseness I have spoken 
of these republics as a whole, the remarks made being 
more or less applicable to them all, still there are marked 
differences between those which have advanced and are 
advancing and others whose political health seems little 
better now than it was fifty years ago. We may distin- 
guish three classes of states. The first consists of those 
in which republican institutions, purporting to exist 
legally, are a mere farce, the government being, in fact, a 
military despotism, more or less oppressive and corrupt, 
according to the character of the ruler, but carried on for 
the benefit of the Executive and his friends. The second 
includes countries where there is a legislature which 
imposes some restraint upon the executive and in which 
there is enough public opinion to influence the conduct 
of both legislature and executive. In these states the 
rulers, though not scrupulous in their methods of grasp- 



542 SOUTH AMERICA 

ing power, recognize some responsibility to the citizens 
and avoid open violence or gross in j ustice. The third class 
are real republics, in which authority has been obtained 
under constitutional forms, not by armed force, and 
where the machinery of government works with regularity 
and reasonable fairness, laws are passed by elected bodies 
under no executive coercion, and both administrative 
and judicial work goes on in a duly legal way. 

Instances of the first class are too familiar to need 
mention. By far the worst is Hayti. The most strik- 
ing example of the second class was Mexico under the 
government of President Porfirio Diaz. The govern- 
ment of that statesman, one of the most remarkable 
men of our time, was autocratic. His power had been 
won by fighting, but was maintained under legal forms. 
The legislature obeyed him implicitly. Elections were 
managed by his government, and that with little diffi- 
culty because, until 1910, when his hold had begun to 
be shaken, no one ventured to vote against him. His 
personal superiority to all the vulgar temptations 
was recognized and admired. His ministers talked to 
the Chambers, but took their orders from him alone. 
His policies were directed to the material development 
of the country by the construction of railways, the en- 
couragement of manufactures, the opening up of mines 
and extension of irrigation. Order was maintained 
by a rural police formed out of former bandits, who by 
having been enrolled, disciplined, and regularly paid be- 
came useful members of society. The lure to conquest 
which the weakness of the republics to the south held 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 543 

out was firmly resisted, and only a moderate army 
maintained. Under this regime the country was ad- 
vancing rapidly in wealth and a class of persons inter- 
ested in order and prosperity was being formed. Had 
the President, when old age arrived, been able to find 
someone like himself to whom he could have handed 
over the reins, prosperity and order would doubtless have 
continued. The sort of government he gave the country 
was probably what best suited it. 1 The Indian popula- 
tion, constituting a majority, were (though naturally 
intelligent) obviously unfit for civic functions. The 
uneducated mass of the mestizos were almost equally so. 
An oligarchic government, formed out of the richer class, 
would have furnished a less efficient administration, 
and would probably, after some years of quarrelling, 
have given place to a military chief. 

Of the third class good examples may be found in 
Chile and Argentina, both of which are bona fide re- 
publics. Chile is of all the Latin- American states 
the one which best answers to European or North 
American notions of a free constitutional common- 
wealth, one of the chief reasons being that her population 
is unusually homogeneous and unusually concentrated 
within a comparatively small area. Northern Chile 
is an arid desert, southern Chile a forest wilderness, 
but in the centre there is an area five hundred miles 
long by fifty wide within which the large majority of 

1 Though much more ought to have been done towards the solu- 
tion of land questions and for the promotion of education. [Mexico 
seems to have now relapsed into a condition as bad as that from 
which Juarez and Diaz rescued her. Note to edition of 1914.] 



544 SOUTH AMERICA 

her 3,300,000 citizens dwell. The suffrage is limited, 
and governing power is practically in the hands of a 
comparatively small landed aristocracy, and a few law- 
yers. Government, including what we called the party 
game, is carried on with the same spirit and by the same 
methods as it was in England during the eighteenth 
century, allowing for the differences between a monarchy 
and a republic. There are constant changes in the min- 
isters, but the machine works, and the general lines of 
national policy are preserved. There have been no rev- 
olutions within the living memory, but there was once a 
civil war. President Balmaceda, finding that he could 
not carry out his policies within the strict limits of his 
constitutional powers, exceeded them and defied the leg- 
islature. Each party, like the English Charles I and his 
Parliament, took up arms to fight out the question of 
right. Balmaceda, defeated in battle, put an end to 
his own life. He had the weaker legal case, but was 
a man with some ideas, quite above the common type 
of ambitious adventurer. After him, Chilean politics 
resumed their normal constitutional course. There 
were, in 1910, six parties, one Conservative and five 
Liberal sections, the latter sometimes acting together, 
sometimes divided. The level of capacity, as well as 
of eloquence, is high, and so is the national spirit of 
the people. 

Argentina has had a more troubled and more san- 
guinary history than Chile, and has more recently 
emerged from among the breakers into smooth water. 
Sixty years ago she had in Rosas a tyrant as cruel as 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 545 

Barrios of Guatemala and as bloodthirsty as Lopez of 
Paraguay, and even later, civil wars raged between the 
people of Buenos Aires and those of the northern states. 
But as the country began to be settled and railroads were 
made and labour was provided by the influx of Italian 
and Spanish immigrants and large cities sprang up, the 
effect of general prosperity was felt in a growing sense 
of the value of order and peace. Though the foreign 
merchants whose interests were involved took no direct 
part in politics, their influence was felt not only in 
promoting sounder finance, but in making the native 
men of substance feel that frequent revolutions were re- 
tarding the development of their properties. Thus, 
since 1893, there has been no armed civil strife of the old 
kind and the public tranquillity is now disturbed only 
by alarms similar to those which the spread and the 
violent methods of anarchism have caused in some parts 
of Europe. That flavour of militarism which was so 
strong in former years has now virtually disappeared. 
The administration is conducted by civilians, and is 
pervaded by a legal spirit. In short, Argentina is now, 
like Chile, a constitutional republic, whose defects, what- 
ever they may be, are the defects of a republic, not of 
a despotism disguised under republican forms. 

The examples of these two countries prove that there 
is nothing in South American air or Spanish blood to 
prevent republican institutions from working. If the 
working is not perfect, neither is it perfect anywhere else 
in the world. What these countries have shewn is that 
with favouring conditions the true constitutional spirit 

2n 



546 SOUTH AMERICA 

can be more and more infused into constitutional forms 
and the old habits of violence eradicated. The case of 
Argentina in particular suggests the process by which 
we may expect that other Latin- American states will, 
by degrees, advance towards a more settled and gen- 
uinely legal government. What is the first thing that 
is needed to enable any community to prosper ? Is it 
not the desire for order and the respect for order, the 
sense that there must be a curb on the impulses and 
passions of individuals, some law duly enforced, some 
means of checking violence and of protecting life and 
property against physical force ? This sense grows with 
the growth of property and with the development of in- 
dustrial habits. The larger the number, and the greater 
the influence in a community, of those who feel that 
revolutions injure not only the country, but also them- 
selves personally, the better is the prospect of breaking 
the revolutionary habit, for a public opinion grows up 
which condemns violence and actively opposes those who 
resort to it. Moreover, the more property there is and 
the more industry there is in a country, the smaller is 
the proportion of those who join in a revolution either 
from a love of fighting or in the hope of bettering their 
fortunes. In a prosperous country, more can be done 
and more is likely to be done for public instruction, 
one of the most urgent needs of these nations. Argen- 
tina's recent efforts in that direction are an instance, 
and education, if it does not make men good citizens, 
makes it at least easier for them to become so. 

To speak of increasing wealth as a factor making for 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 547 

the political progress of a country may sound strange to 
those who in Europe and the United States see how the 
working of free institutions may be endangered and per- 
verted by the corrupting influences of money and the 
money power. Nevertheless, according to the prov- 
erb, "One man's meat is another man's poison," there 
are stages in a nation's growth when it is so essential to 
establish security and give everybody a sense of the 
need for it, that whatever makes for security makes for 
progress. The heart is better than the pocket, but it is 
easier to fill the pocket than to purify the heart. The 
love of liberty is a nobler thing than the love of secu- 
rity, but sometimes the latter needs to be diffused be- 
fore the former can have its perfect work. 

It is true that the desire for order and security may 
lead men to submit willingly to arbitrary power. This 
has often happened since the days of Julius Caesar and 
his nephew. But it has usually happened not because 
men have ceased to value liberty, but because, finding 
that they are failing to secure either security or liberty, 
they think it better to have one than to have neither. 

There are, in Spanish America, some communities still 
so far from being capable of genuine popular self- 
government that the best thing for them is the strong 
rule of an able ruler which will give them prosperity 
through peace, shew them how to develop their re- 
sources, make them, by education and by better 
communications, a more homogeneous people. Those 
things done, such communities will, like Argentina, find 
themselves fitter to work free institutions. At present, 



548 SOUTH AMERICA 

under the rule of selfish adventurers and corrupt legis- 
latures who are the tools of the adventurer, the condi- 
tions of progress are absent. Two or three of the South 
American republics — they are not among those which 
I saw — are still in this condition. The rule of a man 
like Porfirio Diaz would seem to give them the best 
chance of emerging from it. At present they advance 
neither morally nor materially. 

Nevertheless, taking the eleven South American 
states as a whole, their condition is better than it was 
sixty years ago. In most of them the civil element has 
tended to grow and the military element to decline. 
The lawyer-politician is not always a law-abiding politi- 
cian, yet on the whole preferable to the soldier-politi- 
cian. His methods are less brutal. May not even a 
perversion of the law be a trifle better than a disregard 
of all law? Revolutions and civil wars have become 
less sanguinary; the execution of political opponents 
less frequent. Political assassinations, which in Europe 
have unhappily been growing more frequent, 1 are now 
more rare here. The sort of savagery that existed in 
the days when Artigas, fighting for the independence of 
his country, used (according to the story) to sew up 
prisoners in oxhides by batches and roll them downhill 
into the river has long since passed away. Nor is it to 
be forgotten that there is extremely little brigandage 
or insecurity in most of these states, far less than there 

1 There would seem to have been more in Europe within the last 
fifty years than in any preceding period of equal length since the 
seventeenth century. 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 549 

was a few years ago in Sicily. The ordinary citizen is 
little affected even by the revolutions which, where they 
occur, are carried on by a small part of the population. 
Perhaps if the ordinary citizen suffered more, revolu- 
tions would be fewer. 

Ecclesiastical questions have been almost wholly 
eliminated from politics in all the larger and some of 
the smaller states, and religious liberty has been estab- 
lished on a basis not likely to be shaken. A long- 
standing and bitter cause of strife has thus been re- 
moved. 

All the Spanish-American countries, even Paraguay, 
are now more open to the world than they used to be; and 
the currents of its opinion reach them in ever increasing 
volume. As few of them have peaceful political traditions 
of their own to guide or inspire them — when they invoke 
the past, it is the exploits of revolutionary heroes that 
are recalled — they must needs look to the thought and 
practice of the older nations for principles and prec- 
edents in the art of government; so whatever brings 
them into intellectual touch with Europe and North 
America is helpful. Already one discovers an increas- 
ing number of men who perceive that for their nations 
the only path upward and forward is through the creation 
of a spirit of self-control and a higher sense of civic duty. 

To understand these countries, one must think of 
them as having, under the rule of the Spanish Crown 
and of the Church, dropped two centuries behind the 
general march of civilized mankind. When they were 
finally liberated in 1825, they were practically still in 



550 SOUTH AMERICA 

the seventeenth, while Europe and the United States 
were in the nineteenth, century, with the additional dis- 
advantages of a large aboriginal population, a thinly- 
peopled land, fifteen years of bloodshed and disorder, 
such as Europe had not seen for nigh three hundred 
years, and no preexisting constitutional forms or usages. 
A few of them, favoured by physical or by racial condi- 
tions, have already overcome these difficulties. Their 
example will tell upon and encourage the rest. 

In the middle of last century, when European Lib- 
erals, disappointed at the failure of their earlier hopes, 
had begun to pass a severe judgment on the peoples of 
these republics because freedom had not made them at 
once virtuous, happy, and prosperous, were not those 
liberals themselves misled by their own too sanguine 
temper ? Had they not too implicit a faith in the 
power of liberty ? They ascribed all the faults of exist- 
ing governments to the monarchies or oligarchies of the 
past and did not understand, having little experience of 
popular rule, how many faults in governments have 
been, and will continue to be, due not to their form, but 
to human nature itself. Since 1859, power has in many 
countries passed from the hands of the few into the 
hands of the many, but no millennium of virtue and 
peace has yet followed. There is still bitterness and 
discontent, there are still complaints that the law is 
not fair between classes, still a distrust of legislative 
bodies, still demands for an extension of direct popular 
control over the whole machinery of administration and, 
in North America, even over the judiciary. No sensible 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS 551 

man proposes to go back to the absolutism and repres- 
sion of the older time; but every sensible man feels 
that the problems of government are far more difficult 
than our grandfathers had perceived, and that men have 
still much to learn from a fuller experience. These 
things being so, ought not the judgment passed on the 
Spanish Americans to be more lenient ? Their diffi- 
culties were greater than any European people had to 
face, and there is no need to be despondent for their 
future. 



CHAPTER XVI 

SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 

Whether it is well to rejoice that the population of our 
planet has grown so fast during the last century, even as 
the inhabitants of a city rejoice when a decennial cen- 
sus reveals a rapid growth in their city, is a question 
which may be deemed a branch of the larger one 
whether life is worth living. The fact, however, being 
unquestionable, raises a practical question. If the pres- 
ent rate of growth should continue for a few centuries, 
there presently will be little room left on the planet. 
What will then happen? During the nineteenth cen- 
tury the surface of the earth has been explored suffi- 
ciently to enable us to know how much of it is available 
for the production of food. Of that part which was 
available and unused in 1800 a great deal had been 
settled by 1900. In Europe there is no more land 
to be occupied, because the waste spaces of southern 
Russia have now been almost filled by settlers from 
the rest of that country. In the temperate parts of 
Asia, though there has been considerable Russian im- 
migration into western Siberia and considerable Chinese 
immigration into Manchuria, there still remain in 
those countries large tracts unoccupied and not too 
dry for cultivation. In Australia it is still doubt- 

552 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 553 

ful how much of the land whose aridity has discour- 
aged settlement can be turned to account either for 
tillage or for pasture. In North America the immense 
rush to the West, which began after 1830 with the 
building of railways, has now filled nearly the whole of 
the United States, and a very large part of Canada, so 
that another forty or fifty years may see the country 
filled up as far as the frozen north. In Africa there are 
parts of Tunisia and Algeria which irrigation might re- 
claim, there are parts of Morocco which could support 
a larger population than now dwells in them, and there 
is also a limited highland area on the eastern side of 
the continent fit to be inhabited by men of European 
stock. The rest, including not only the Sahara, but 
most of the country south of the Tropic of Capricorn, 
is either arid desert, or else so hot and humid that it 
must be given up to the black races, who have so far 
shewn no capacity for settled industry when left to 
themselves. Thus, if we omit the tropical countries 
inhabited by savage peoples (central Africa and the 
islands of southeastern Asia), it will appear that, should 
the present increase of the civilized peoples be main- 
tained, the rest of the world will not suffice for their 
agricultural expansion for more than a short period, 
that is to say, a period shorter than the four centuries 
which have elapsed since the outward movement of the 
European peoples began with the discovery of the New 
World. 

What then of South America ? Before dealing with 
it, let me advert to two considerations which may 



554 SOUTH AMERICA 

modify the conclusions suggested by any review of the 
total area now available to meet a continued growth 
of population. 

May not intensive cultivation and the further devel- 
opments of chemical science greatly increase the food- 
producing power of lands already occupied? Doubt- 
less they may. They are doing so already. But 
such an increase cannot be expected to go on indefinitely. 
The urgency of the problem may be postponed, but the 
problem will remain ahead of us. 

May not the rate of increase of the world's popula- 
tion decline, and perhaps go on declining until an equi- 
librium between that increase and food production 
has been reached? This is possible. Observations 
made during the last thirty years have already 
thrown grave doubts upon the propositions advanced 
by Malthus three generations ago which were for a long 
time taken as irrefragable. That the signs of decreas- 
ing birth-rate are so far visible only among some of 
the most advanced peoples is not a cheering cir- 
cumstance, for what we must desire in the interests 
of mankind at large is that the more highly civilized 
races should increase faster than the more backward, 
so as to enable the former to prevail not merely by force, 
but by numbers and amicable influence. All these 
considerations, however, regarding birth-rate are still 
too uncertain to be allowed to affect any enquiries 
regarding future food supply and the regions from 
which it is to come. Whatever light the next few 
decades may throw upon the former question, the 






SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 555 

latter deserves to be investigated as a subject of grow- 
ing significance. 

And now we may return to South America, the only 
continent containing both a large temperate and a 
large tropical area capable of cultivation which still re- 
mains greatly underpeopled. It is, therefore, the chief 
resource to which the overpeopled countries may look 
as providing a field for their emigration, and to which 
the world at large may look as capable of reinforcing 
its food supply. That it has not been sooner occupied 
is due partly to the political disorders which have given 
it a bad name, partly to its being less accessible than 
North America. Both these adverse conditions no 
longer apply to its temperate regions. 

Considered as a field for emigration, South America 
may be divided into three sections. There are, first, 
the tropical and forest-covered regions of Colombia, 
Venezuela, Guiana, and eastern Brazil; secondly, the 
temperate and grassy or wooded regions of Argen- 
tina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil outside the trop- 
ics; and lastly, the great central plain of the Ama- 
zon and its tributaries which the Brazilians call the 
Selvas (woods). I exclude altogether the mountainous 
parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, because they are 
already as well inhabited as they deserve to be. A very 
small part of them is fit for stock or for agriculture, and 
the climatic conditions (except in a few valleys) are repel- 
lent to persons not accustomed to great altitudes. Not 
even Italians can be expected to cultivate fields twelve 
thousand ieet above sea-level. 



556 SOUTH AMERICA 

The other three sections just mentioned are much un- 
derpeopled. The first is better fitted for negro or Indian 
labour than for that of whites, yet there are many parts 
of it where men of south European stock can work 
in the open air and thrive. In an area of about 
two millions of square miles, it has about seven and 
a half million inhabitants, of whom a small minority 
are pure whites, the rest Indians or negroes or mixed. 
Four or five times that number could easily find 
accommodation . 

The second section is the one pre-eminently fitted to 
receive white men. Its area may be roughly conjectured 
at a million and a half of square miles, but so much of the 
Argentine part of it is desert that it would not be safe to 
reckon more than two-thirds of it as available for settle- 
ment. As there are now only twelve millions of people 
in this million of square miles, there is evidently plenty 
of room for more. 

This is the part of South America which has drawn 
most immigrants during the last sixty years, south- 
ern Brazil leading the way, Argentina and Uruguay 
following. It is also the region which will chiefly con- 
tinue to attract Europeans for many years to come. 

In Argentina and most of Uruguay, as in the prairie 
states of North America and the Canadian Northwest, 
there are no trees to be felled, so the land, extremely fer- 
tile, can be brought under crops immediately. The 
estates are at present large, but if there were settlers 
with enough capital to buy small lots, these could 
soon be had, and already some Italians are establish- 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 557 

ing themselves as peasant cultivators. 1 It is a country 
where the labour is at present small in proportion to the 
area utilized, partly because much of the land is in pas- 
ture, partly because its flatness makes the use of agricul- 
tural machinery specially easy, partly because the har- 
vests are largely reaped by migratory Europeans who 
return home for part of the year. Nevertheless, after 
making all allowances, both Argentina and the other 
tracts I have referred to are capable, supposing immigra- 
tion to continue at the present rate, of providing work 
and homes for immigrants for at least sixty or seventy 
years to come. Locusts are said to destroy the crop once 
in three or four years, but this plague is deemed likely 
to diminish as settlement and civilization extend north- 
wards to the regions whence it now comes. The esti- 
mate that before the end of the century Argentina 
may have fifty, Uruguay ten, and southern Brazil 
thirty millions of people (assuming the birth-rate to be 
maintained) need not seem extravagant to anyone who 
knows how rapidly settlement has advanced in North 
America and who realizes that before long the stream 
of agricultural immigration will cease to flow into the 
United States and may slacken in its flow towards 
Canada. 

The cultivable areas of Chile are relatively small; 
and the Chileans themselves seem to think they need 
more land for their national development. To one 

1 The small cultivator in Argentina is under this disadvantage 
that a severe drought or a swarm of locusts may ruin him, whereas the 
large farmer with more capital can bear the loss of one season's crop. 



558 SOUTH AMERICA 

who travels through southern Chile there seems, how- 
ever, to be still room for a greatly increased population 
in its well- watered valleys, which enjoy a delightful 
climate. The future of these four countries is assured, 
so far as the gifts of nature can assure it. The world 
will always want what they produce. 

Far more doubtful is the future of the third section, 
the Selvas, or forest-covered Amazonian plain. It 
includes nearly all the western half of Brazil, and the 
eastern parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador. An 
estimate of its area at 2,300,000 square miles, including 
the basin of the Tocantins river, might not be extrava- 
gant. It is an almost absolute level 1200 miles long, 
from north to south, and 1500 wide. Those parts 
which he along the great river and its larger tribu- 
taries are so low that these rivers when they rise in the 
rainy season spread out their waters for from sixty 
to eighty miles or more on each side, and immense 
stretches of country not actually flooded become impas- 
sable morasses. But away back from the rivers there 
are higher grounds, flat, but raised sufficiently to be 
above the inundations ; and on its western margin the 
great plain is bordered by a stretch of undulating country 
before the foot of the Andes is reached. All the country, 
whether level or undulating, is covered with forest. The 
trees grow so close that there is no way of travelling ex- 
cept by boat along the streams. Intense heat and abun- 
dant moisture combine to make vegetation so profuse 
and rank that ground cleared of trees is, after three or 
four years, covered thick again. 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 559 

In this vast area there are, except in a few trading 
stations along the river, only one of them a consider- 
able town, 1 practically no inhabitants, perhaps not a 
human being to a square mile. The few and scattered 
inhabitants outside these stations are Indians, nearly 
all savages, most of them heathens. Some are war- 
like, and skilful in the use of their bows and of the 
long blow pipe from which they discharge poisoned 
darts, but the greater number are timid and feeble, an 
easy prey to the rubber gatherers, who have in some 
places shewn themselves more cruel than the wildest 
Indian. 2 Here and there in Peru and Bolivia there 
are a few cultivated districts in the undulating ground 
along the base of the Andes, where some sugar, coffee, 
and cocoa are raised. But the only product of 
any commercial importance is rubber, collected from 
several kinds of trees, and exported in vast quantities 
down the tributary rivers into the Amazon and thence 
to the sea. The whole region, however, appears to be 
of extreme fertility, and to this the size of the trees, as 
well as the profusion of the vegetation, bears witness. 
Most of it is covered with vegetable soil accumulated 
during many thousands of years, and has never been 
touched by human hand. As many of the woods are 
valuable, there might be a considerable trade in timber, 
but the cost of getting out great logs is practically pro- 

1 This is Manaos in Brazilian territory. Higher up, in Peruvian, 
is the smaller town of Iquitos. Ocean-going steamers ply as far as 
Manaos. 

2 See ante, p. 76. The evil is widespread and horrible. 



560 SOUTH AMERICA 

hibitive, for the trees are of so many different kinds that 
it is hard to obtain a large supply of the same kind on 
any given area, and there has hitherto been no means of 
transport, except by water. 

Can these Amazonian Selvas, which form the largest 
unoccupied fertile space on the earth's surface, be re T 
claimed for the service of man ? 

This question is not a practical one for our generation, 
and I mention it only because it raises an interesting ' 
problem, the solution of which will one day be attempted, 
since so vast and so fertile an area cannot be left forever 
useless. Since men have begun to make railways through 
mountains and deserts, and to build bridges across arms of 
the sea like the Firth of Forth, and most of all since the 
cutting of the Panama Canal, it has become an accepted 
doctrine that every work is only a question of cost. 

If ever, when the world is fuller than it is now, it 
becomes worth while to attempt the reclamation of 
this vast region, the process would probably begin by 
placing colonists on the more elevated grounds above 
the annual inundation and setting them to clear away 
the wood and cultivate the soil. Hard work would be 
needed to keep down the efforts of Nature to hold her 
own against man by her tremendous vegetative power, 
but those who know the country believe that this could 
be done, and that the difficulties of transport through 
the lower parts of the forest to the banks of navigable 
streams might also be overcome. Hundreds of thou- 
sands of square miles might be in this way rendered 
habitable and cultivable, assuming that capital and the 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 561 

proper kind of labour could be obtained. To reclaim 
the lower land along the banks of the rivers by con- 
structing embankments or levees like those along the 
lower Mississippi would be a more arduous undertaking, 
and might involve an expenditure disproportionate to 
the results. 

Whence would come the capital ? If the country be- 
longed to some great and wealthy nation, in which there 
were many enterprising men seeking employment for 
their wealth, the thing might be attempted on a great 
scale, perhaps even by the nation itself. Whether 
capitalists from other countries will embark on such an 
enterprise, which could hardly be carried out except 
by the aid of a government, is doubtful. If attempted 
at all, it must be on a large scale, for such gradual colo- 
nization by settlers coming in small groups, as would be 
the natural process in temperate regions, is scarcely pos- 
sible in a country where man has so powerful a nature to 
overcome. 

Supposing the capital provided, the question of labour 
would remain. Who would do the work ? and when the 
work was done, who would inhabit and cultivate the 
lands reclaimed ? Thirty years ago the fear of tropical 
diseases would have made these regions seem impossible 
for white men, even as foremen or overseers. To-day 
the discovery that insects are the chief poison carriers 
of disease has reduced our fears. But to-day it still re- 
mains doubtful whether the men of any European race 
can retain health and vigour in a climate so moist and 
so hot, and so far away from sea or mountain breezes, 

2o 



562 SOUTH AMERICA 

as are the central parts of the Selvas. It is at 
any rate unlikely that they could do continuous open- 
air work there. If white men cannot be employed, what 
other labour would be available ? As the native Indians 
are too few and too feeble to be worth regarding, it 
would be necessary to bring in some race native to the 
tropics which had already formed habits of steady in- 
dustry. If the world were to-day what it was a century 
ago, this would be a simple matter. Negroes would 
be kidnapped in Africa and taken up the rivers 
to work under white or mulatto overseers. Nowa- 
days, compulsion being impossible, persuasion alone 
remains. Negroes abound on the east side of Brazil, 
but they have plenty of land there and are mas- 
ters of the situation, seeing that the planters are more 
eager to get them than they are to work for the 
planters. Nowhere in South America is there a prob- 
lem of the unemployed. Whether Chinese or Indian 
coolies could be brought into the Selvas, and whether 
if brought they would remain under the control of the 
white employers who had imported them, are questions 
which may one day arise. Nothing is being done now 
to exploit these regions except as sources of wild rubber 
supply. But it seems certain that coming generations 
will endeavour to turn to the service of man the largest 
unused piece of productive soil that remains anywhere 
on the earth's surface. 

Leaving this forest wilderness out of account, and 
confining our view to the near future, can any estimate 
be made of the probable growth of population in South 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 563 

America generally, and of the total it may reach by the 
end of the present century? 

As respects the temperate regions, there exist some data 
for a conjecture : Should the influx of immigrants belong- 
ing, as do the Italians, to a prolific stock be maintained, 
the countries south of the Tropic of Capricorn may in 
a.d. 2000 contain at least one hundred millions of people. 

As respects the equatorial regions, which now receive 
hardly any immigrants and in which the natural growth 
of population is slow, no such data exist. Considering, 
however, the material development which is going on in 
some, and may be expected in all, of them, they also may 
probably increase in population which would bring them 
from twenty-eight up to at least forty millions. 1 Were 
this to happen, thecontinent would have by a.d. 2000 a 
population not far short of one hundred and fifty mil- 
lions. At present, with only about forty-five millions, it 
has much less than half the population of North America, 
now about one hundred and twenty millions. The 
rapid growth of North America, likely to continue for two 
generations at least, may make the proportion between 
the two much the same in a.d. 2000 as it is to-day. 

All such speculations are, however, subject to the 
possibility that the birth-rate, either in the temperate 
regions, or generally, may decrease. Such a decrease 
has, as respects Australia, thrown out the calculations 
made forty or fifty years ago. 2 

1 1 include English, Dutch, and French Guiana. 

2 In Victoria the annual rate of increase per cent of population 
which in 1871 was 3.07 per cent was in 1901 only .48 per cent In 
New South Wales it was in 1871, 3.7 per cent, in 1901, 1.8 per cent. 



564 SOUTH AMERICA 

More important than the quantity of a population 
is its quality. Any enquiry as to what that of the South 
American countries will be when they are tolerably well 
filled up at the end of the present century can profitably 
address itself to one point only, viz. the several races 
and their relations to one another. There are now 
three races, Whites (of Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian 
origin), 1 Indians, of many tribes speaking different 
languages, and Negroes. A very rough estimate of the 
racial elements in the whole continent 2 might give some 
such results as these : — 

Whites, 15,000,000 (more than half of them in 
Argentina and Uruguay). 

Indians, 8,000,000. 

Negroes, 3 3,000,000. 

Mixed whites and Indians (mestizos), 13,000,000. 

Mixed whites and negroes (mulattoes and quadroons), 
5,700,000. 

Mixed negroes and Indians (zambos) (chiefly in 
Brazil) perhaps 300,000. 

The reader will understand that these figures, based 
partly on a comparison of those given in various books 
and partly on enquiries addressed to competent observ- 
ers, are given as only a rough approximation to the facts. 
There are no data for any exact estimate, and the diffi- 

1 The Italians are chiefly in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern 
Brazil. 

2 There are also some East Indian coolies in Guiana, perhaps 
100,000. 

3 The negroes are almost all in Brazil, but a few exist on the 
coasts of Peru, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela. 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 565 

culty of drawing any line between those who ought to be 
classed as pure whites and those who ought to be classed 
as mestizos or mulattoes, would be insuperable even 
if a regular and careful census were taken. 1 In arriv- 
ing at this conjectural estimate, those who have three- 
fourths or more of white blood are counted as whites, 
those who have less than three-fourths as mestizos, or 
mulattoes. 

If these figures are somewhere near the truth it will 
be seen that if we deduct 8,000,000, representing the 
two purely white republics of Argentina and Uruguay, 
we shall find that in the other Spanish republics, taken 
together, the mestizo element is much larger, and the 
Indian element somewhat larger than the white element. 
To explain the practical significance of these figures let 
me repeat what was said in an earlier chapter, that the 
mestizos and whites are, for political and social purposes, 
practically one class and that the ruling class, the 
Indians being passive, and in a political sense outside 
the nation. Even in Paraguay, an almost purely In- 
dian state, the comparatively few mestizos dominate 
politically. In Brazil it is the whites who rule, but 
many of them are tinged with negro, fewer with In- 
dian, blood. 

Four questions may be asked regarding the racial 
future : — 



1 The United States census returns do not attempt to discrimi- 
nate between mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons ; all are reckoned 
as coloured ; and no doubt a certain number of quadroons and octo- 
roons pass as white. 



56G SOUTH AMERICA 

1. Which of the races is or are increasing ? 

2. Is the intermingling of races likely to continue ? 

3. Which type predominates in persons of mixed 
race? 

4. What is likely to be the ultimate outcome of the 
mixture of races ? 

1. There are no official figures supplying an answer 
to this question as regards the northern and the Andean 
republics; but the traveller receives the impression 
that the Indians are more prolific than the whites, 
though their neglect of sanitary conditions gives a high 
death-rate, especially among children. It is rare to see 
an old man among them. If either they or the mesti- 
zos are now increasing, it is at no rapid rate. The pure 
whites in Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil are 
certainly increasing, and thus the proportion of white 
to other blood in the continent as a whole is growing. 

2. Everything points to a continuance of the process 
of race mixture. It is the rule in all parts of the world, 
except where religion or a strong feeling of race antago- 
nism (such as exists in the United States) prevents it. 
Neither of these hindrances exists in South America. 
In Peru and Bolivia, however, the process is so slow 
that it may be centuries before the white and aboriginal 
elements have been so completely commingled as to 
form one race, and leave no pure Indians remaining. 

3. In the mixed race (mestizo or mulatto) the white 
element seems usually to predominate. I do not state 
this as a physiological fact. It may or may not be 
so; nobody seems to have investigated the matter. 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 567 

But it is true as a social fact ; that is to say, the mestizo 
deems himself a white, wishes to be a white, tries to 
live and think as a white, and is practically recognized 
by others as a white. This is not equally true of the 
negro, because he is, physically regarded, further off the 
white than is the Indian. But in Brazil, when the negro 
is able to take his stand, so far as education and prop- 
erty go, beside the white, he too thinks and acts like 
a white man and is so treated. 

4. The facts just stated make* it probable that the 
nations likely to emerge when the process of fusion is 
complete, perhaps at a very distant date, will be white 
much more than Indian nations. Blood is only one 
factor, and not the most important factor, in the mak- 
ing of men. Environment and the influence of the 
reigning intellectual type count for more. In the 
United States the child of the Polish or Rouman or 
Italian immigrant grows up as an American. He may 
be a more emotional and impulsive, a more violent or 
more criminal, a more artistic and sensitive American ; 
but the stamp of the new country is on him So ap- 
parently will it be, so at any rate it has been, with the 
Indian. Tinged however slightly by the blood of the 
higher race, he will become a Spanish-speaking man of 
the colonial kind, which differs from the European kind 
at least as much as an English-speaking North American 
differs from an Englishman. These mixed nations will, 
however, stand nearer, intellectually and socially, to 
the South European group of nations than to any 
other white peoples. 



568 SOUTH AMERICA 

It may seem natural to assume that such mixed na- 
tions will, in respect of their aboriginal blood, be in- 
ferior to their European relatives. But this is a mere 
assumption. No one has yet investigated scientifi- 
cally the results of race fusion. History throws little 
light on the subject, because wherever there has been 
a mixture of races there have been also concomitant 
circumstances influencing the people who are the prod- 
uct of the mixture which have made it hard to determine 
whether their deterioration (or improvement) is due 
to this or to some other cause. So in these countries 
there may be reservoirs of dormant strength in the 
ancient native races waiting to be opened by conditions 
better than fortune has given them since the days of the 
Conquest. Who knows whether when the fusion is 
complete the Bolivian of two or three centuries hence, 
who will be nine-tenths, or the Paraguayan, who will 
be nineteen-twentieths, of Indian blood, will be inferior 
to his neighbours with a smaller aboriginal infusion? 
The Chilean peasant to-day, who is at least half Indian, 
is not inferior to the Argentine peasant, who is almost 
pure white. 

In speaking of the future South American type as 
likely to be in the main "Spanish-colonial," I do not 
suggest that it will be uniform. Already there are varia- 
tions in character between the peoples of the several re- 
publics ; and these are more likely to be accentuated than 
to disappear. The different extent to which aboriginal 
elements become absorbed, and the differences in those 
aboriginal elements themselves, will be among the fac- 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 569 

tors which will produce what may be called national 
" sub-types " of character. But apart from such causes it 
seems to be a general — I will not say universal — law of 
social growth that an independent political community, 
even if originally the same in race, religion, and habits 
as its neighbours, tends to draw apart from them, and 
to form an individuality of its own, creating a national 
type and impressing that type upon its members. 

Were there any forces compelling these various re- 
publics to close political alliances, such as the fear of 
attacks by a Power outside their continent, they might 
suppress their jealousies and ally themselves close with 
one another and realize better than they do now all that 
they have in common. But they are not, and are not 
likely to be, so threatened. Holland, France, and Eng- 
land all at one time meddled in South America, but all 
three, while each retaining a foothold in Guiana, have 
long ago drawn apart and left Latin America to itself. 
Politically its republics live in a little world of their own ; 
they have their own alliances, their own wars and bit- 
ternesses, with which strangers do not intermeddle. Of 
wars they have had, since 1825, their full share ; nor is the 
danger of war yet extinct. No states seem likely to unite 
with one another of their own free will, but it is possi- 
ble that smaller states may be annexed by or partitioned 
among some of the larger ones, their weakness and in- 
ternal disorders furnishing to powerful neighbours, as in 
the famous case of the partition of Poland, at once 
the temptation and the pretext. 

As the Old World no longer interferes with the South 



570 SOUTH AMERICA 

American states, so they are unlikely to interfere with 
the Old World. They have never proclaimed any such 
self-denying ordinance, and have not hitherto been 
strong enough to make it seem needed. But even if 
any among them becomes a first-class power, small is 
the chance that it can acquire interests in other parts 
of the globe that would collide with those of other na- 
tions. Were Colombia and Venezuela strong states 
owning strong navies, there might be Caribbean ques- 
tions to embroil them with neighbouring maritime states. 
But the three leading powers of South America belong 
to its southern half, and there are now no unoccupied 
countries left to be acquired as colonies. 

To what has been said in a preceding chapter regarding 
the internal political conditions and political pros- 
pects of the South American republics little need 
here be added. He who studies their history since 
Independence, with a knowledge of what they were 
when it was assured in a.d. 1825, will find nothing sur- 
prising in the storms that have buffeted them, nor any- 
thing to discourage a hope that they may eventually 
reach a smoother sea. The moral of that history is 
that nations have to be trained to self-government, 
just as individual men have to be trained to every 
work requiring patience and skill. The error into which 
the victorious colonists fell when they expected free- 
dom and prosperity to follow at once on their deliv- 
erance from Spain was not their error only. It was 
shared by their friends in Europe and even more fully 
by their friends in North America. The latter had 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 571 

succeeded in establishing efficient state governments 
and thereafter an efficient federal government. They 
attributed this partly to liberty, i.e. to their having 
broken their tie with a European monarchy, partly to 
the benign influences of a new Continent, free from the 
evil traditions of the Old World. Many among them 
made the mistake, which no intelligent North Amer- 
ican makes now, of thinking that their history began 
in 1776, the mistake of ignoring the centuries during 
which their ancestors had been learning the principles 
of self-government in England and the century and a 
half during which they had been putting those principles 
into practice in the older colonies. In this state of mind 
and attaching a magic significance to the name of a 
republic, the people of the United States did not see 
why Spanish America, which had imitated them in 
rejecting a European king and was placed, like them, 
in a new land, should not repeat their happy experi- 
ences. Liberal enthusiasts in England and France and 
Italy were scarcely less sanguine. None of them real- 
ized that Spanish America belonged, in 1825, to an age 
which England and North America had long left behind. 
Most of the land was wilder than England or Germany 
had been in the twelfth century, a thin population, no 
roads, settlements scattered here and there in forests or 
deserts. The peasantry were further back than those of 
western Europe in the fifteenth century, not merely rude 
and ignorant, but speaking native languages and soaked 
in primeval superstitions. The upper class were further 
back than those of Europe in the seventeenth century, 



572 SOUTH AMERICA 

for few of them had received any sort of higher educa- 
tion and none of them had any personal knowledge of 
free institutions, or any experience in civil administra- 
tion. Thus both classes wanted the foundation on 
which free governments must be erected. The humbler 
class did not know and could not know how to elect 
representatives or supervise those whom they elected. 
The upper class did not know how to legislate or govern. 
They tried to erect a superstructure of complicated 
political institutions when there was no solid founda- 
tion to build on, when only a few of the choicest minds 
knew what order meant and what liberty meant and 
what was the relation between the two. Such experi- 
ments were foredoomed to failure. 

The troubles of these ninety years have, accordingly, 
nothing in them that need dishearten either any friend 
of Spanish America or any friend of constitutional free- 
dom. The person who ought to reconsider his posi- 
tion is the man who holds that any group of human 
beings called "the people" are always right, that the 
best and sufficient way to fit men for political power is 
to give it to them, and that the name of Republic has 
the talismanic gift of imparting virtue and wisdom to the 
community which adopts it. The mistaking of names 
for things is an old error, and has sometimes proved a 
fatal one. 

Yet there was something noble in the over-sanguine 
confidence of the North American and European lib- 
erals, as well as of some of the finest minds among the 
South Americans themselves when they expected free- 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 573 

dom to work miracles. The ideal of liberty that these 
men set up, though rarely realized, has never been lost. 
Servility and obscurantism have never resumed their old 
sway in South America. And as it is true that men 
need to be trained to self-government, so it is also true 
that men never become fit for the work till they try it. 
The ninety years of turmoil have not been altogether 
wasted. Two real constitutional republics have already 
emerged from it and their example cannot but tell on 
those others who, oppressed by less favourable condi- 
tions, still lag behind. That sort of progress which 
consists in getting rid of the old ideas and old habits of 
thinking and acting and replacing them by better ones 
must needs be a slow process. Something has already 
been done, and the closer and more frequent contact 
with Europe and North America into which these 
Spanish-American states are being brought ought to 
accelerate the process. So ought the additional motives 
for desiring order which the growth of material prosper- 
ity brings with it. Already the presence of foreigners 
imposes a certain check, and their property is generally 
respected in revolutions. The more the citizens acquire 
capital and themselves enter on commercial undertak- 
ings, and form business habits, and get to look at things 
with a practical eye, the stronger and more general 
will grow the public sentiment that insists on replacing 
the reign of force by the reign of law. When force has 
been eliminated, the task of making governments pure 
and rooting out fraudulent methods will become less 
difficult. It is a fair conclusion from European history 



574 SOUTH AMERICA 

that violence is, of all the evils that afflict a state, the 
evil which must be first extinguished. In England, a 
period of corruption set in after the great Civil War 
had ended, and the forms of constitutional government 
were often grossly perverted, but corruption and per- 
versions ultimately disappeared with the growth of a 
higher sentiment. 

Those South American states which have a large 
aboriginal population, even if they cannot become — 
and is it desirable that with such a population they 
should become ? — democracies of the modern type, 
may at least try to secure order and such material 
prosperity as will bring them into closer touch with 
the outer world, and enable their peoples to learn, 
and be influenced by, the ideas and the methods of 
government that prevail among the great nations. 

Intellectual and social progress were both in the 
ancient world and in the Middle Ages largely due to the 
reciprocal influences of nations on one another. As the 
want of these influences retarded the movement tow- 
ards civilization of the Peruvians and Mexicans before 
the Conquest, so the isolation of the Spanish Ameri- 
cans has retarded their development ever since. They 
stood almost entirely outside the current of European 
thought and had little personal contact with Europeans 
till English and German merchants and English railway 
men, and North American mining engineers began to 
come among them from about 1860 onwards, and till 
somewhat later, the wealthy Argentines and Brazilians 
found their way to Paris. Although this contact has 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 575 

brought capital in its train, and given a start to material 
development, it has been a force rather among the peo- 
ple than of the people. It comes from without and is 
pumped into them like oxygen from a tube. It touches 
only one section of the inhabitants, and one side of their 
life. It is teaching them business methods and all that 
is therein implied, but it affects them only slightly on the 
literary, or scientific, or artistic side. This is of course 
less true of countries like Argentina and Chile than of 
the smaller northern republics, yet even in the former 
it is material interests that are dominant. This is, no 
doubt, in our day true of all European countries as well 
as of North America. In Europe, however, and also 
in the United States and Canada, the number of men who 
occupy themselves with science and letters is far larger 
in proportion to the population than it is in the South 
American countries, and the provision made for higher 
education incomparably more ample. Argentina has, 
indeed, not only the University of Buenos Aires, al- 
ready staffed by able and energetic teachers, but the 
older and more ecclesiastically coloured University of 
Cordova and the new. University of La Plata and its 
excellent military school, as Chile has its university 
in Santiago, and as Uruguay has the University of 
Montevideo. But these stand almost alone. Isola- 
tion, as well as poverty, has been a cause of the weak- 
ness of these organs of national life, a deficiency which 
order and prosperity ought presently to remove in other 
states as they have in Argentina. 

One cause of the isolation I have referred to is found in 



576 SOUTH AMERICA 

the fact that there has been comparatively little literary 
production during the last two centuries in the language 
which these nations speak. Spanish is no doubt what 
the Germans call a " World Speech." It is now used by 
sixty millions of people in the New World as well as by 
twenty millions in Old Spain. But Old Spain never 
supplied to her colonies through books anything 
approaching the volume of that perennial stream of 
instruction and stimulation which English-speaking 
writers have for nearly four centuries supplied to 
those who can read English all over the world, and 
which France has likewise supplied to all who can 
read her language. In South America, men now learn 
French in increasing numbers, but they are still a 
small percentage of the educated population of Spanish 
America. 

Of the eight or nine millions of people in Ecuador, 
Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay probably one-half are not 
only illiterate, but cannot speak even Spanish. These 
facts constitute no reproach on the peoples of these 
states. They are a result of the circumstances attend- 
ing the Conquest in the sixteenth century and of the 
way in which Spain thereafter administered her colonial 
empire. 

That political conditions will improve during the 
next century seems altogether probable, and although 
social advance must be slow, especially where the 
native population is very large, political progress is 
sometimes unexpectedly rapid. To anyone observing 
England during the Wars of the Roses civil strife might 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 577 

have seemed so ingrained a habit as to be likely to 
last for generations. Yet after the accession of the 
first Tudor there were only a few slight troubles down 
till 1641, when a really great issue appeared which had to 
be fought out and was fought out within four years. So 
in our own days we have seen a new country, Bulgaria, 
as soon as it was delivered from a foreign despotism, step 
forward towards settled government with a firm tread 
which surprised all Europe. Democracy in the North 
American sense may be still far distant, but a settled 
government, maintaining order, giving opportunities 
for educational and social as well as material improve- 
ment, and responsible to the opinion of the more educated 
classes, may be much nearer than the never-ending, 
still beginning, troubles of the last ninety years have 
led most Europeans to expect. 

To forecast what one may call the intellectually crea- 
tive future of the Spanish- Americans is far more difficult. 
Considering themselves not Spaniards, but a new people, 
or peoples, they hold that views or predictions about 
them based on the history and tendencies of Spaniards 
are beside the mark. Nevertheless, as the other race 
factors — the quality of the aboriginal element and 
the results of an intermingling of the aboriginal with the 
Spanish colonial stock — are obscure, it is only in the 
Spanish element that any sort of basis for speculation can 
be found. Now the Spanish, or so-called Iberian, race, 
more or less Latinized during the ages of Roman domin- 
ion, and slightly Teutonized by the Germanic invasions 
of the fifth century, has been always a strong race. It 
2p 



578 SOUTH AMERICA 

was strong when it fought against Rome, and strong 
when it resisted the Moors in its mountain fastnesses 
and drove them step by step backwards, and ulti- 
mately out of the peninsula. It produced in the 
Middle Ages and afterwards many warriors and states- 
men of the first rank. But the genius of the race seems .•Vr**^! 
to have at all times run more to practical life than 
towards intellectual creation. Two or three writers £±j$l 
are of world fame, and so are two or three artists, 
without reckoning the mostly unnamed or unknown 
mediaeval architects who reared ecclesiastical buildings 
of unsurpassed beauty. Metaphysical talent, turned 
into theological channels, gave birth to some dogmatic 
and casuistical writings of unquestionable power. Still 
the total quantity of literary or artistic product of high 
excellence is small when compared with that of Italy or 
France. That this is more markedly true of the later 
seventeenth and the eighteenth than of earlier centuries 
may be explained by the extinction in the sixteenth of 
intellectual freedom. French literature still flourished 
while Spanish was sinking under ecclesiastical censure. 
In Spanish America, where remoteness from European 
influences darkened the firmament still further, scarcely 
any literary or scientific work of permanent merit was 
accomplished, though the fountain of pleasing verse did 
not cease to flow. 1 The stormy times of the War of 

1 The country which has of late years produced most good poetry 
is, I believe, Colombia. Argentine writers have distinguished them- 
selves chiefly in the sphere of theoretical jurisprudence and inter- 
national law. 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 579 

Independence and the domestic turmoil that everywhere 
followed gave no opportunities for acquiring knowledge 
nor any leisure to use it. It is only recently, and chiefly 
in Mexico and in the southern South American states, 
that the day of more benignant conditions has seemed to 
be dawning. It is true that in them, as political conflicts 
subside, material interests come first to the front, and, 
like a rank growth, so cover the ground that not much 
room is left for the play of intellect upon matters prom- 
ising no direct pecuniary gain to the nation or to indi- 
viduals. This was to be expected at a time when 
the development of natural resources attracts foreign 
capital and fills the minds of enterprising men. It 
is the salient feature of the fife to-day of Argentina, 
Uruguay, and Brazil, and to a slighter extent of Chile 
also. But it need not be permanent. Just as in 
North America there came, not long after the Civil 
War, a passionate eagerness to found universities and 
extend the range and improve the efficiency of the higher 
scientific and literary teaching, so the leading men in 
these more advanced states may realize the need for bas- 
ing their civilization on the enlightenment of the people. 
The task before them is harder than that which the 
North Americans had, because their system of elemen- 
tary and secondary education is far less complete. With 
this extension of higher instruction and the closer 
communion of the best minds with those of the northern 
hemisphere, there may at any time come an outburst 
of purely intellectual activity. Prediction is so much 
more difficult in this field than in the field of politics 



580 SOUTH AMERICA 

that one must abstain from venturing to enter it. 
Shrewd observers living in the middle of the eighteenth 
century were able to foretell some sort of political up- 
heaval as approaching in France ; but nobody foretold 
the flowering in Germany of the great literature which 
began with Kant and Lessing and continued in Goethe 
and Schiller, Fichte and Hegel. 

The traveller in South America who confines himself, 
as many do, to the larger cities, finds them so like those 
of Europe and North America in their possession of the 
appliances of modern civilization, in their electric street 
cars and handsome parks, in their ably written press, in 
the volume of business they transact — I might add in 
the aspect of the legislatures and in the administrative 
machinery of their government — that he is apt to fancy 
a like resemblance in the countries as a whole. But the 
small towns and rural districts are very far behind, 
though least so in Chile and Argentina. If one regards 
these various nations as a whole, one is struck by the 
want of such an " atmosphere of ideas," if the phrase 
be permissible, as that which men breathe in Europe 
and in North America. Educated men are few, books 
are few, there is little stir of thought, little play of cul- 
tivated intelligence upon the problems of modern soci- 
ety. Most of these countries seem to lie far away from 
the stream of intellectual life, hearing only its distant 
murmur. The presence of a great inert mass of igno- 
rance in the native population partly accounts for this ; 
and one must remember the difficulty of providing 
schools and the thinness of a population scattered 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 581 

through mountainous or desert or forest-covered re- 
gions. These disadvantages may in years to come be 
lessened, but in the meantime those who are born with 
superior talents are born into an ungenial environment, 
ill-fitted to develop and polish such talents to their own 
and to the public benefit. The traveller finds, now and 
then in some of these states, gifted men who would be 
remarkable in any country. One whom I knew in 
Mexico years ago was as brilliant and as accomplished 
in many lines of knowledge as any person I have ever 
known. But it takes a large number of such men to 
influence a nation and guide the course of its opinion. 
Men of marked ability abound, but their talent, like 
the system of instruction of the country, is directed 
almost exclusively to practical ends, and does less than 
it ought either for political progress or for the expan- 
sion of the national mind. Their interest in science is 
almost entirely an interest in its applications, and their 
hero is the great inventor. Science and learning, pur- 
sued for their own sake, have not yet won the place 
they ought to hold. Those in whom a taste for philo- 
sophical speculation or abstract thought of any kind 
appears, seldom devote themselves to patient investi- 
gation. They are apt to be captured by phrases and 
formulas, perhaps of little meaning, which seem to give 
short cuts to knowledge and truth. 1 

1 One is told that the European books most popular among 
the few who approach abstract subjects are those of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, whose influence was always greater in the South European 
countries and in Russia than in England or the United States. Those 
few are unwilling to believe that he is not deemed in his own coun- 
try to be a great philosopher. 



582 SOUTH AMERICA 

Another fact strikes the traveller with surprise. Both 
the intellectual life and the ethical standards of conduct 
of these countries seem to be entirely divorced from 
religion. The women are almost universally " practis- 
ing " Catholics, and so are the peasantry, though the 
Christianity of the Indians bears only a distant resem- 
blance to that of Europe. But men of the upper or 
educated class appear wholly indifferent to theology 
and to Christian worship. It has no interest for them. 
They are seldom actively hostile to Christianity, much 
less are they offensive when they speak of it, but they 
think it does not concern them, and may be left to women 
and peasants. The Catholic revival or reaction of the 
first half of the nineteenth century did not touch Span- 
ish America, which is still under the influence of the 
anti-Catholic current of the later eighteenth. The 
Roman Church in Spain and Portugal was then, and 
indeed is now, far below the level at which it stands 
in France, Germany, and Italy. Its worship was more 
formal, its pressure on the laity far heavier, its clergy 
less exemplary in their lives. In Spanish America the 
obscurantism was at least as great and the other faults 
probably greater. There was not much persecution, 
partly, no doubt, because there was hardly any hetero- 
doxy, and the victims of the Inquisition were compar- 
atively few. But the ministers of religion had ceased 
not only to rouse the soul, but to supply a pattern for 
conduct. There were always some admirable men to 
be found among them, some prelates models of piety 
and virtue, some friars devoted missionaries and hu- 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 583 

manely zealous in their efforts to protect the Indians. 
Still the church as a whole had lost its hold on the con- 
science and thought of the best spirits, and that hold 
it has never regained. In saying this I am comparing 
Catholic South America not with the Protestant coun- 
tries of Europe, but with such Roman Catholic coun- 
tries as France, Rhenish Prussia, and Bavaria, in all of 
which the Roman Church is a power in the world of 
thought and morals. In eastern Europe the Orthodox 
Church has similarly shrivelled up and ceased to be an 
intellectual force, but there it has at least retained the 
affection of the upper class, and is honoured for its 
fidelity during centuries of Musulman oppression. In 
the more advanced parts of South America it seems to 
be regarded merely as a harmless Old World affair which 
belongs to a past order of things just as much as does 
the rule of Spain, but which may, so long as it does not 
interfere with politics, be treated with the respect which 
its antiquity commands. In both cases the undue 
stress laid upon the dogmatic side of theology and the 
formal or external side of worship has resulted in the 
loss of spiritual influence. In all the Spanish countries, 
the church had trodden down the laity and taken 
freedom and responsibility from them more than 
befell anywhere else in Christendom, making devo- 
tion consist in absolute submission. Thus when at 
last her sway vanished, her moral influence vanished 
with it. This absence of a religious foundation for 
thought and conduct is a grave misfortune for Latin 
America. 



584 SOUTH AMERICA 

The view which I am here presenting is based chiefly 
on what I saw in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, the 
three countries in which there is a larger educated class 
than in the less populous republics. It applies in a 
less degree to Chile; and there are, of course, excep- 
tions in the three first-named republics also, though 
not numerous enough to affect the general truth of 
what I am trying to state. The phenomenon is all 
the more remarkable because in the days when America 
began to be settled there was no part of Europe 
where religion had so strong a hold on the people 
as it had in Spain and Portugal. The Conquistadores, 
whatever may be thought of the influence of their 
faith upon their conduct, were ardently pious in their 
own way. Even in the desire they professed for 
the propagation of the faith among the Indians, they 
were not consciously hypocritical, though they never 
allowed their piety to stand in the way of their 
avarice. 

The fiery vigour of that extraordinary group of men 
has often blazed out in their descendants. It is the 
appearance in almost every state of men of tireless 
energy and strenuous will that gives their chief interest 
to the wars and revolutions of the last hundred years. 
Few of these men, besides the heroes of Independence, 
such as San Martin, Belgrano, Miranda, Bolivar, and 
Sucre, are known to Europe, and of those who are 
known, some like Francia and Artigas and Rosas and 
Lopez, have won fame by ruthlessness more than 
by genius. Of late years the leading figures have 



SOME REFLECTIONS AND FORECASTS 585 

been more frequently statesmen and less frequently 
soldiers. Both types are honourably represented to- 
day in many of the republics. There is plenty of 
strength in the race, and Juarez of Mexico is only 
one of many examples to show that Indian blood 
does not necessarily reduce its quality. Into what 
channels its force will be hereafter directed, and whether 
it will develop a gift for thought and for artistic 
creation commensurate with the activity which it has 
shewn in other fields, is a question upon which its 
history since 1825 sheds little light. The wind bloweth 
where it listeth. 

In the more progressive states, conditions are chang- 
ing as fast as anywhere else in this changeful age. 
Here, as everywhere, the Present is the child of the Past, 
but the features of the child change as it grows up, and 
all we know of the future is that it will be unlike the 
past. No countries have more possibilities of change 
than those of South America. European immigrants 
are streaming into the southern republics. The white 
race is commingling with the aboriginal Indians in the 
west and with the negroes in the east. Scientific dis- 
covery is bringing its latest appliances into contact with 
countries still undeveloped and with peoples long left 
behind in the march of progress. Till the middle of 
the eighteenth century the world of trade, politics, and 
thought was practically a European world. It then 
expanded to take in North America, then southern Asia 
and Australia, and then, last of all, the ancient nations 
of the Far East. South America, which has hitherto, 



586 SOUTH AMERICA 

except at rare intervals, stood outside, has now begun 
to affect the commercial and financial movements of 
the world. She may before long begin to affect its 
movements in other ways also, and however little we 
can predict the part that her peoples will play, it must 
henceforth be one of growing significance for the Old 
World as well as for the New. 



NOTES 

Note I. The reader who desires fuller information 
regarding the countries treated of here may wish to be 
referred to some books in English. The most conven- 
ient general historical accounts are perhaps to be found 
in Mr. Akers' History of South America, 1851^-1901^, 
and in Mr. T. C. Dawson's The South American Re- 
publics (2 vols.). For Peru Sir Clements Markham's 
History of Peru is still the best, to which may be added, 
for the earlier period, his recent work, The Incas of Peru. 
Mr. Scott Elliot's History of Chile is useful. The 
chapters on Peru in The History of the New World, by 
Mr. E. J. Payne, a scholar of great talents too soon lost 
to historical science, contain a thoughtful study of the 
causes to which the progress towards civilization of the 
ancient Peruvians was due. The two books of Professor 
Moses, The Establishment of Spanish Rule in America 
and South America on the Eve of Emancipation, are fair 
in spirit and throw much light upon topics regarding 
which little has been written in English. The fullest 
and most careful account of Peruvian and Bolivian an- 
tiquities is still that of Mr. Squier : Peru, Travel and 
Exploration in the Land of the Incas (1877). Of more 
recent works of travel that which stands first in the field 
of natural history is John Ball's Notes of a Naturalist 
.in South America (1887). Among others of a more 
general kind the following may be named : Across South 
America, by Hiram Bingham ; The South Americans, 

587 



588 NOTES 

by Albert Hale ; The Other Americans, by Arthur Ruhl ; 
Uruguay, by W. H. Koebel; Argentine Plains and 
Andine Glaciers, by Walter Larden ; Panama, by Albert 
Edwards; Argentina, by W. A. Hirst; and the Ten 
Republics, by Robert P. Porter. Sir M. Conway's 
Travels and Explorations in the Bolivian Andes is 
addressed primarily to mountain climbers, but contains 
much that is interesting to other readers also. A re- 
cent book in French entitled he Bresil au XX me Siecle, 
by M. Pierre Denis, is short, but singularly clear, well 
informed, and judicious. 

In the publications issued by the Pan American 
Union in Washington a great deal of valuable statistical 
information brought up to date may be found. The 
South American Supplements issued monthly by the 
London Times are well edited and constitute a useful 
current record of what is going forward. 

Note II. Some readers may also wish to hear what 
are the facilities for travel in the parts of South America 
covered by this book. There are now many well- 
appointed railways in Argentina and Uruguay, and 
a smaller number in Chile and Brazil, and both in the^e 
and other states the work of construction is going on 
steadily. Roads fit for driving are still comparatively 
few and rough, but in level countries like Argentina one 
drives over the Pampa wherever wire fences do not 
bar the way. Travel in the Andes is mostly upon 
mule back ; it is slow and has become expensive. The 
capital cities of the republics have good hotels. In 
Arequipa, the larger coast towns of Chile, and three 



NOTES 589 

or four of the Argentine and Brazilian cities, fair 
accommodation can be had. Elsewhere it is very poor, 
and the food no better. The scale of prices is every- 
where high, but most so in Buenos Aires and Monte- 
video, which have won the reputation of being the 
most expensive places in the world to live in, surpassing 
even Petersburg and Washington. 

A great deal of what is most interesting in the six 
republics above referred to can now be seen by railway, 
and if a few plain but fairly comfortable hotels (such as 
that at Santa Rosa de los Andes on the Transandine 
Railway) were placed here and there upon the chief 
Peruvian, Chilean, and Brazilian lines, journeys along 
them would present no exceptional difficulties. There 
is now no yellow fever except in Guayaquil and on the 
Amazon ; and the conditions of health are on the whole 
not unfavourable. Those who intend to travel in the 
loftier parts of the Andes ought, however, to satisfy 
themselves that their hearts and lungs are sound. 

Note III. A remarkable testimony to the harm 
wrought by the Spanish Conquest on the aboriginal 
inhabitants of Peru may be found in the will of Legui- 
samo, one of the last survivors of the Conquistadores, 
made at Cuzco in 1589, and printed in Sir Clements 
Markham's book, The Incas of Peru. 

" I took part in the conquest and settlement of these 
kingdoms when we drove out the Incas who ruled them 
as their own. We found them in such order and the 
Incas governed them in such wise that there was not a 



590 NOTES 

thief nor vicious man nor adulterer nor bad woman 
admitted among them. The men had honest and use- 
ful occupations. The lands, forests, mines, pastures, 
houses, and all kinds of products were regulated and 
distributed in such sort that each one knew his prop- 
erty without any one else seizing it, nor were there law- 
suits. The operations of war, though numerous, never 
interfered with the interests of commerce or agriculture. 
All things from the greatest to the smallest had their 
proper place and order. The Incas were feared, obeyed, 
and respected by their subjects as men capable and 
versed in the arts of government. . . . We have sub- 
dued these kingdoms and we have destroyed by our evil 
example the people who had such a government as these 
natives enjoyed. They were so free from committing 
crimes that the Indian who had a large quantity of gold 
in his house left it open, only placing a small stick across 
the door as a sign that its master was absent. With 
that according to their custom no one could enter or 
take anything. . . . But now they have come to such 
a pass, in offence of God, owing to the bad example we 
have set them in all things, that these natives have 
changed into people who do no good or very little." 

Some allowance must be made in this description for 
the disappointment and sadness in which Leguisamo 
wrote, as appears from other parts of his will ; and 
other evidence at our disposal shews that his picture 
of Peru under the Incas is too favourable, yet even 
after making these deductions, the admission of the 
harm wrought by the conquerors and the consequent 
decline in native character and conduct carries weight. 




BOLIVIA 

AND 

PERU 



Scale of Miles 



to 5,000 feet 
5,000 to 10,000 feet 
10.000 feet and over 
.Author's Route 



0'- Lou; 



INDEX 



Aboriginal population, present con- 
dition of, in Andean regions, 180— 
186 ; the Araucanians in southern 
Chile, 232-238; of Brazil, 367; 
influence of, on differentiation of 
various parts of Spanish America 
into nations, 432-433 ; importance 
of, as a factor in all parts of the con- 
tinent except Argentina and Uru- 
guay, 454 ff. See Indians. 

Achachila, Mountain Spirit, 186. 

Aconcagua, Mt., 57, 142, 214, 268; 
description of, 257-258. 

Adams, John Quincy, diplomacy of, 
497, 508. 

Adobe houses, Payta, 41 ; at Sicuani, 
88 ; in Lake Titicaca region, 123. 

Agriculture, in Peru, 41-42, 78; of 
Indians in interior of Peru, 87-88 ; 
on central plateau of Peru, 120, 
122-124; importance of, to Bo- 
livia, 193 ; in southern Chile, 231, 
240 ; difficulties of practice of, on 
Falkland Isles, 310 ; in Argentina, 
329-331 ; risks to, in Argentina, 
from drought and locusts, 333- 
334, 557 ; rank of Argentina in 
agricultural products, 336 ; in 
Uruguay, 354 ; in Brazil, 403 ff . ; 
retardation of, by the unassimi- 
lated Indian population, 475-476; 
suitability of Argentina, Uruguay, 
and southern Brazil for, 556-557. 

Aguas Calientes, town of, 87. 

Aked, History of South America by, 
587. 

Alakaluf tribe of Fuegians, 294. 

Albatrosses, seen on voyage to Straits 
of Magellan, 287, 288. 

Alcaldes of Indian villages, 91 ; 
powers and duties of, 180-181. 

Alcohol from sugar-cane, made by 
Peruvian Indians, 467. 

Alexander VI, Pope, bull of, dividing 
New World between Spain and 
Portugal, 366. 



Alfalfa, 177, 202, 263, 334. 

Almagro, Diego de, 204, 218. 

Alpacas, 78, 81. 

Alpaca wool, 122. 

Alps, comparison of Andes and, 277. 

Altars of churches, Cuzco, 99. 

Altitude, mountain sickness resulting 
from high, 83 ; effects of, of La Paz, 
171-174; of Ecuador, Peru, and 
Bolivia a deterrent to immigration, 
555. 

Amazonian plain (the Selvas), 369- 
370 ; future of, 558-562. 

Amazon River, 40, 369 ; forests of 
the, 75-76, 393-394; soufces of 
the, 86. 

American Commonwealth, cited, 340 n. 

Americas, the two : the naming of, 
484-487 ; names which might have 
been given, 487 ; physical similar- 
ities between, 488-489; points of 
similarity in settlement of 489- 
490 ; points of divergence, 490 ff . ; 
Latin America and Teutonic 
America, 490 ; differences in the 
aboriginal tribes, 491-492 ; differ- 
ences in climate, in discoveries of 
mines, and in class of immigrants 
to, 492-494; differences in the 
sphere of government and adminis- 
tration, 494-495 ; resultant un- 
likeness of, in everything but posi- 
tion in Western Hemisphere, 495- 
496 ; effect on mutual relations of 
achievement of independence, 496- 
497 ; divergence of fortunes of, as 
to wealth and population, 497-499 ; 
difference in the formation of 
nations, — two in Teutonic Amer- 
ica against nineteen states in Latin 
America, 499-500 ; points of re- 
semblance to be found in republi- 
can forms of government, in social 
equality, and in detachment from 
European politics, 501-504; con- 
trasts between people of, in ideas 
and temperament, 504-505 ; present 
attitude of, toward one another, 



591 



592 



INDEX 



507 ff. ; common relations be- 
tween, shown to be wholly wanting, 
507-520; the Monroe Doctrine, 
and South American view of, 508- 
510. 

Ampato, Mt., 57, 81. 

Anahuac, Peruvian Indians compared 
with those of, 159, 160 ; plateau of, 
compared with the Andes, 278. 

Anarchist propaganda in Argentina, 
343. 

Ancohuma (Hanko Uma), peak of, 
142. 

Ancon, hill of, 9-12. 

Ancon, village of, 27. 

Ancud, channel of, 239. 

Andenes, terraces in Lake Titicaca 
region, 122. 

Andes mountains, 38, 39, 42, 47; 
description of peaks of Western 
Cordillera, 55-58, 60, 61, 63, 81, 
82; gold in the, 192; .splendor of 
scenery of, 200-201, 203, 241-242; 
tunnel through the, 251, 256; 
trips across the, 252-261, 267-271 ; 
passage of, by San Martin's army, 
268, 280-281; the Christ of the, 
summit of Uspallata Pass, 269-270 ; 
descent of, on open trolley, 270- 
271 ; comparisons of, with other 
great ranges, 271 ff. ; as a field for 
mountain climbers, 272 ; advantages 
of distance for viewing, 272-275 ; 
why an unfavourable field for land- 
scape painters, 275-276 ; compari- 
son of, with Himalayas, 276-277 ; 
comparison with Alps and North 
American ranges, 277-279 ; ex- 
pense and difficulty of travel in the, 
588. 

Andrez, nephew of Tupac Amaru, 
92. 

Animals, on Peruvian highlands, 77- 
78, 81-82; of Bolivia, 177; of 
forests of southern Chile, 245 ; 
absence of, among Fuegians, 294- 
295 ; on Pampas of Argentina, 
325-326. 

Antarctic current, the, 38, 39, 43, 45, 
489. 

Antimony mines, 87. 

Antiquities. See Ruins. 

Antiquity of Cuzco, 109 n. 

Antofagasta, 169, 202, 210, 211, 215. 

Antofagasta and Bolivia Railroad, 
187, 189-190, 191-192. 



Araucana, epic by Alonzo de Ercilla, 
236. 

Araucanian Indians, 159, 225 ; home 
of, in Central Valley of Chile, 232- 
233 ; primitive semi-civilization 
of, 233-234 ; maintain their inde- 
pendence against the Spanish, 233- 
235 ; Chile asserts authority over, 
235-236 ; remain the one uncon- 
quered native people of South 
America, 236 ; estimates of former 
and present numbers, 236 ; inroads 
of disease and drink among, and 
government protection of, 236— 
237; religion of, 237-238. 

Araucaria, conifer of southern Chile, 
244. 

Arawak Indians, 457. 

Areche, Spanish judge, 116. 

Arequipa, Peru, 60 ; history, 60 ; 
altitude, 60 ; climate, 60-61 ; Har- 
vard Observatory, at, 61 ; scenic 
wonders at, 62-64 ; houses, streets, 
and people, 64-66 ; Indian la- 
bourers in, 66 ; an ecclesiastical 
stronghold, 66-67 ; romance of 
the runaway nun at, 69-74 ; termi- 
nal of Southern Railroad of Peru, 
80. 

Argentina, 52 ; entrance to, across 
the Andes, 251-260 ; contrasts be- 
tween Chile and, 264-265; rail- 
ways of, 264, 329, 337, 588 ; differ- 
ence as to interest aroused between 
Peru, Bolivia, and Chile and, 315, 
346 ; proportion of population of, 
dwelling in Buenos Aires, 322-323 ; 
natural features of, 324-325 ; the 
Pampas, 325-329 ; farms and 
cattle ranches of, 329-331 ; allot- 
ment of land into large estates held 
by great landowners, 331-333 ; 
Italians in, 332-333, 339-340, 438, 
516-517 ; leading agricultural prod- 
ucts of, 336 ; cattle, sheep, and 
horses in, 336 n. ; possibilities of, 
as to growth in wealth and popula- 
tion, 337-338 ; composition of 
population of the country. 338- 
340 ; effect on future of nation of 
European commingling, 339-341, 
346-348 ; separation of church 
from politics in, 342-343 ; anar- 
chist propaganda in, 343 ; relative 
positions held by politics, litera- 
ture, and business in, 344-346; 



INDEX 



593 



excessive patriotism of people, 346 ; 
influence of geographical position 
on its differentiation as a separate 
political entity, 429 ; a true nation 
by the test of possessing a distinc- 
tive national quality and a strong 
national sentiment, 441 ; armament 
maintained by, 449 ; slight influ- 
ence of Italians on political and 
intellectual life of, 516-517 ; Brit- 
ish capital invested in railways of, 
517 ; a bona fide republic, after a 
troubled and sanguinary political 
history, 544-545 ; pre-eminent fit- 
ness of, for immigration, 556-557 ; 
universities and schools in, 575 ; 
writers on theoretical jurisprudence 
and international law in, 578 n. 

Arias, Pedro de, 477. 

Arica, 169. 

Aridity of the Pampas of Argentina, 
333. 

Armies of South American countries, 
449. 

Arrow points found at Tiahuanaco, 
148. 

Art, displayed in altars of churches 
at Cuzco, 99 ; lack of excellence in, 
in South America, 99 ; ancient 
Peruvian, 106-107 ; inferiority of 
ancient Peruvian, as a whole, 
154. 

Artigas, Jose, savage treatment of 
prisoners by, 548, 584. 

Ascotan, 201. 

Assassinations, political, in South 
America and in Europe, 548. 

Asuncion, 179. 

Atacama, Desert of, 204. 

Atahuallpa, treachery of Pizarro to, 
98, 192. 

Aullagas Lake, 126, 190-191. 

Australia, effect of Panama Canal on 
trade to, 34 ; decreasing birth-rate 
of, 563 n. 

Australian gum trees, world-wide 
spread of, 92-93 ; at La Paz, 176- 
177 ; on the Pampas, 335 ; in 
Montevideo, 353. 

Ausungate, Mt., 108. 

Avenida Central, Rio de Janeiro, 
381. 

Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires, 316- 
317, 346. 

Ayacucho, battle of, 166. 

Ayllu, Indian clan, 180. 

2q 



Aymara Indians, 121-124 ; traditions 
of the, 149 ; at La Paz, 179, 182 ; 
one of the two divisions of Indians 
found by Spanish, 183-184 ; pres- 
ent condition of, 460-462 ; iso- 
lated social position of, 474-475. 

Ayuritamiento, municipal council, 
535. 



B 



Bahia, city of, 400-401. 

Bahia, battleship, 396-399. 

Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 1, 4, 8, 11, 
37, 283, 477. 

Balboa Hill, Panama, 8. 

Ball, John, Notes of a Naturalist in 
South America by, 227, 289, 587. 

Ballivian, Senor, 178. 

Balmaceda, President of Chile, 222 ; 
advanced policies, defeat, and 
death of, 544. 

Balsas, boats of Totora, Lake Titi- 
caca, 125, 141. 

Bandelier, Islands of Titicaca and 
Koati by, quoted and cited, 63-64, 
142 n., 185 n., 465-466, 467-468. 

Barley, grown on central plateau of 
Peru, 120, 122. 

Barnevelt Island, 293. 

Barrios, Gerardo, 545. 

Bas Obispo, 21. 

Bath of the Inca, Island of the Sun, 
133. 

Beagle Sound, 292. 

' ' Big Trees ' ' of Calif ornia, comparison 
of South American trees with, 245, 
391. 

Bingham, Professor Hiram, ascent of 
Coropuna by, 57 n. ; cited on 
antiquity of Cuzco, 109 n. ; Across 
South America by, cited, 113 n., 
588 ; quoted on South American 
view of Monroe Doctrine, 509-510 ; 
on number of North Americans as 
compared with number of Germans 
in Brazil, 510 n. 

Biobio River, 225, 227, 235. 

Birds seen on voyage to Straits of 
Magellan, 287-288. 

Birth-rate, acceleration of, among 
immigrants to Argentina, 339, 566 ; 
decrease in the world's, may help 
to solve overpopulation problem, 
554-555 ; unreliability of estimates 
based on, as shown by Australia, 



594 



INDEX 



563 ; higher among Indians than 
among whites, 566. 

Blanco, Guzman, 519, 525. 

Blanco, Rio, 254. 

Boats of Indians on Lake Titicaca, 
125, 141. 

Bogota, 52. 

Boleta, weapon of Gauchos, 328. 

Bolivar, Simon, 167 ; fame of, ex- 
ceeds merits, 507 ; Pan-American 
Union project of, 511 n. ; form of 
government favoured by, 538, 540. 

Bolivia, 42, 57 ; distinction between 
Peru and, purely arbitrary, 121— 
122 ; reasons for lack of natural 
boundaries, explained by history of, 
166-167 ; named for Simon Boli- 
var, 167 ; an entirely inland state, 
167 ; people, 167 ; area, popula- 
tion, and towns, 168 ; railways of, 
168-169, 186-187, 191-192, 193- 
194; minerals of, 190, 192-193; 
necessity of railways to, for sake 
of cohesiveness of country, 193- 
194 ; the risk of a future parti- 
tioning of, 448 ; proportion of 
Indians in population of, 458 ; 
population in proportion to area, 
527 ; not a country for immigrants 
to turn toward, 555. 

Bolson, basin-shaped hollow, 95. 

Borax, lakes of, 199 ; mining and 
preparing of, 199-200. 

Botafogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro, 381. 

Botanical Garden, Buenos Aires, 319 ; 
Montevideo, 353-354; Rio de 
Janeiro, 382. 

Bougainville, colony planted at Falk- 
land Isles by, 312. 

Brazil, area and aboriginal Indians of, 
367 ; mountains, valleys, and in- 
land plain of, 368-369 (see Selvas) ; 
exportation of coffee, 372 ; won- 
ders of scenery of, 385 ff . ; charac- 
ter of villages, 389-390; trees, 
flowers, and forests of, 390-394 ; 
how it fell to the Portuguese to 
colonize, 401-402 ; negroes in, 401, 
404-405, 408 ; account of different 
regions of, 402 ff. ; proportion of 
foreign population in, 407 ; politi- 
cal history of, 410-411; present 
political conditions, 411-413 ; chief 
economic and political issues in, 
413 ; transitional state of society 
in, 414 ; status of coloured popula- 



tion, 414-415, 479-480; financial 
standing of the nation, 415; 
letters and oratory in, 416-417; 
possibilities of, in other hands than 
its present possessors, 420-421 ; 
characterized by true national 
qualities, 441 ; armament main- 
tained by, 449 ; slavery in, 456 ; 
effect of intermixture of blood in, 
480 ; titles of nobility in, 502 n. ; 
slight influence of Italians on 
political and intellectual life in, 
516-517 ; pre-eminent fitness of 
southern, for immigration, 556- 
557. 

Brewery, at Cuzco, 102 ; at Valdivia, 
229. 

Brigandage, decrease in, 548. 

British, at Valdivia, 229 ; population 
of Falkland Isles composed of, 310 ; 
capital invested by, in Argentine 
railways, 337 ; in Argentina, 340- 
341 ; capital of, in railways of Uru- 
guay, 354-355 ; Santos-Sao Paulo 
railway line built and owned by, 
372 ; Leopoldina railway owned 
by, 386 ; capital of, invested in 
South America generally, 517. 
See also English. 

Buccaneers, English, 12, 15-16. 

Bueno, Rio, excursion on the, 242- 
243. 

Buenos Aires, city of, 216 n., 262 ; 
dulness of water approach to, 315- 
316 ; general appearance, streets, 
houses, etc., 316-318; business 
rush and social gaiety of, 318 ; 
docks and harbour works at, 319— 
320 ; shanties in suburbs of, 320 ; 
outer rim of pretentious places, 
320-321 ; make-up of population 
of city, 321-322 ; predominance of 
Spanish and Italian speech in, 322 ; 
proportion of population of whole 
country dwelling in, 322-323 ; 
terms used to designate population 
of, as opposed to that of rest of 
nation, 323 ; anarchists in, 343 ; 
the press of, 344 ; numbers of 
North Americans and of Germans 
in, 510 n. ; University of, 575 ; 
expense of living in, 589. 

Buenos Aires, viceroyalty of, 166, 
327, 349. 

Building, excellence of ancient Peru? 
vians in, 154-155. 



INDEX 



595 



Cabildos, municipal councils, 535. 

Caboclos, half-breeds called, 408. 

Cabral, Pedro Alvares, 366-367. 

Cachendo, town of, 56. 

Calama, village of, 202. 

Calcutta, comparison of Botanic 
Garden at, with that at Rio de 
Janeiro, 382. 

California poppy about Valparaiso, 
214. 

Callao, 46. 

Canal Zone, the, 4-35. 

Canary Isles, mummies of primitive 
inhabitants of, 157 n. 

Candelaria, celebration of feast of, 
Copacavana, 129-130. 

Candido, Joao, mutineer leader, 396. 

Cannibalism in ancient Peru and 
among Amazonian tribes, 157. 

Canning, George, diplomacy of, 497, 
508. 

Cape Horn, 293. 

Caracoles, 270. 

Cara Indians, 159. 

Carbajal, Francisco, 477. 

Carib Indians, 456-457. 

Casas, Bartolome de las, 464. 

Castro, dictator of Venezuela, 525. 

Cathedral, Lima, 48-49 ; Arequipa, 
65, 67; Cuzco, 97-98; La Paz, 
175 ; Santiago, 217. 

Catholicism, position of, in Argen- 
tina, 342—343 ; effect of, on attitude 
of whites toward Indians and 
negroes, 471-472 ; status of the 
Church in Spanish America gen- 
erally, 582-584. 

Cattle, transportation of, across the 
Andes, 252 n. ; breeding of, about 
Buenos Aires, 321 ; on Pampas of 
Argentina, 327, 328 ; numbers of, 
in Argentina, 336 n. ; in Uruguay, 
354. 

Caupolican, Araucanian chief, 184, 
235 ; memorial to, at Temuco, 516. 

Cedars of southern Chile, 245. 

Census of Peruvian Indians taken by 
Viceroy Toledo, 457. 

Central America, ruins in Peru con- 
trasted with those in, 106, 113; 
to be grouped with South America 
rather than North, 490 ; impossi- 
bility of existence of a real democ- 
racy in, 539. 



Cereals, the important production oi 
Argentina, 336. 

Ceremonial dances of aboriginal 
tribes, 130, 185, 467-468. 

Cerro, hill and castle of, Montevideo, 
353. 

Chachani, Mt., 56-57, 60, 62, 81. 

Chagres River, 6, 7, 8, 15, 20-21, 
24. 

ChaUa, Bay of, 134. 

Charles V, Emperor, 12, 98, 284, 499, 
500. 

Charrua Indians, 159, 355. 

Chenopodium, 120. 

Chibcha Indians, Bogota, 13, 457. 

Chicha, drink brewed from maize, 90, 
123, 467, 468 n. 

Chile, 52, 57 ; Peruvian nitrate prov- 
inces conquered by, 42 ; peculiarity 
of length and breadth of, 205 ; 
mountains and valleys of, 205-206 ; 
three regions of, 206-207; the 
nitrate fields, 207—209 ; revenue to, 
from export duties on nitrates, 209 ; 
large estates and landed aristoc- 
racy of, 220 ; predominance of 
politics in, 221 ; civil war in (1890), 
222 ; party divisions and an elec- 
tion in, 222-223 ; description of 
southern portion, 223 ff . ; coast 
towns and seaports of the south, 
225-232 ; fusion of whites and 
Indians in, 232 ; immigration into 
southern, from Europe, 239-240; 
lake, river, and mountain region of, 
241-247 ; contrasts between Ar- 
gentina and, 264-265 ; influence of 
its geographical position on sepa- 
rate political status of, 429 ; a 
true nation in possessing a dis- 
tinctive national quality and a 
strong national sentiment, 441 ; 
armament maintained by, 449 ; 
.successful working of real republi- 
can government in, 543—544 ; room 
for increased population in, 557- 
558 ; university in Santiago, 575. 

Chile River, 60, 82. 

Chiloe, island of, 223, 239. 

Chimborazo, Mt., 40. 

Chimu city, ruins of, near Truxillo, 
44, 153, 183. 

China, slight immigration into South 
America from, 438 ; improbability 
of danger to South America from, 
504. 



596 



INDEX 



Chincha Islands, guano deposits on, 
46. 

Chinchilla, habitat of the, 200. 

Chingana, Labyrinth, on Titi Kala, 
136-137. 

Cholos, half-breeds at Oruro, 190, 
195 n. 

Choqquequirau, ruins at, 113. 

Christianity, attitude of Indians tow- 
ard, 465-466. 

Christ of the Andes, statue of, 256, 
269-270. 

Chucuito, lake of, 136 n. 

Chullpas, on Island of the Sun, 133. 

Chuquisaca (Sucre), 166, 167, 168, 
193-194. 

Church, of Company of Jesus, 
Arequipa, 67 ; at Copacavana, 
129-130 ; at Tiahuanaco, 148. 

Church, the Roman Catholic, sepa- 
ration of, from politics in Argen- 
tina, 342-343 ; party antagonistic 
to, in Uruguay, 363-364 ; complete 
separation of state and, in Brazil, 
% 412-413 ; slight influence of, on 
progress of South American coun- 
tries toward national life, 436- 
437 ; present status in Spanish 
America, and causes, 582-584. 

Churches, Cuzco, 98-99 ; La Paz, 
174-175. 

Cities, phenomenon of growth of, out 
of proportion to that of the coun- 
tries to which they belong, 322 

Clemenceau, Georges, South America 
of To-day by, quoted, 412, 417. 

Climate, on coast of Peru, 38-39 ; 
at Lima, 51 ; effect of differences 
in, on development of the two 
Americas, 431, 492. 

Coal, lignite, at Punta Arenas, 300 ; 
lack of, in Argentina, 336. 

Coast Range, western South America, 
81, 224,225, 297; of Brazil, 381, 
384. 

Coca, liquor made from, 89-90. 

Coca-leaf chewing, 182, 467. 

Cochabamba, 168, 193. 

Cochrane, Lord, 230, 280; 

Cockburn Channel, 292, 298-299. 

Coffee, exportation of, from Brazil, 
372 ; description of a plantation, 
387-388; region where grown, in 
Brazil, 403. 

Cog-wheel railway on Transandine 
line, 252. 



Coillelfu, town of, 244. 
Collahuasi copper mine, 198. 
Collao, country called the, 121, 

183. 
Collao Indians, 86. 
Colombia, 17, 76 ; forests of coast, 
39 ; question of true national 
qualities of, 441-442 ; population 
in proportion to area, 527 ; poetic 
output of, 578 n. 
Colon, city of, 5, 11, 13, 23. 
Colour line, absence of a, in South 

America, 470-474, 479, 482. 
Columbus, Christopher, statue of, 5 ; 
voyage of Magellan as compared 
with voyages of, 282 ; belief of, 
that it was India he had reached, 
484-485. 

Commerce, effect of Panama Canal 
on European, 34. 

Concepcion, 225-226. 

Condorcanqui, Jose Gabriel (Tupac 
Amaru), 92, 116. 

Congresses of American republics, 
511 n. 

Conquistadores, undeniable piety of, 
584. See Pizarro. 

Conway, Sir Martin, climbing in the 
Bolivian Andes by, 142 ; on com- 
position of mountains in Cordil- 
lera Real, 143 ; on varying effects 
of rarity of air, 173 ; attempted 
ascent of Mt. Sarpiento by, 299 ; 
book by, 588. 

Copacavana, shrine of Virgin of the 
Light at, 126, 129. 

Copan, ruins of, comparison of 
ruins at Cuzco with, 106. 

Copper mines, Peru, 42 ; near Aguas 
Calientes, 87; Bolivia, 189, 190, 
192 ; the Collahuasi mine, 198. 

Copper smelting, Corral, 229. 

Coquimbo, 39, 206, 211. 

Corcovado, peak of, Rio de Janeiro, 
380. 

Cordillera range in Peru, 55-58, 77- 
79. 

Cordillera Real, the, 127, 141-143. _ 

Cordova, Argentina, 323, 326; Uni- 
versity of, 323, 575. 

Coronel, port of, 227. 

Coropuna, Mt., 57, 83. 

Corral, town of, 229-230, 280. 

Cortes, 516. 

Costa Rica, 13, 503. 

Cotton, production of, in Argentina, 



INDEX 



597 



336 ; labour on Brazilian planta- 
tions of, 404-405. 

Courtship, South American, 51. 

Criollos, the, 513. 

Criticism, susceptibility of South 
■Americans to, 506. 

Croker Peninsula, 292. 

Crooked Reach, Straits of Magellan, 
293, 297. 

Crucero Alto, the, 83. 

Cuahtemoc, last of the Aztec kings, 
516 ; statue of, 516. 

Cuba, influence of geographical posi- 
tion on its status as a political 
entity, 429. 

Culebra Cut, Panama Canal, 8-9, 
20, 21-22, 23, 24-25. 

Cumbre, the, 267, 268, 280. 

Cusipata, plaza of, Cuzco, 97. 

Cuzco, 54; position as an ancient 
capital, 95 ; description of the 
present-day city, 95-97 ; cathedral 
of, 97-98; churches at, 98-99; 
merits and demerits as a place of 
residence, 100 ; University of, 100- 
101 ; Indian population of, 101- 
102; walls at, 103 ff. ; walls of 
Sacsahuaman, 106 n., 107-112, 
118 ; proof of extreme antiquity of, 
109 n. ; rumours of subterranean 
passages at, 110; the Rodadero, 
111 ; the Seat of the Inca, 111-112 ; 
Sacsahuaman probably older than, 
112-113 ; other ruins of walls 
about, 113 ; horrors of Spanish 
rule at, 115-117; memories and 
reflections aroused by, 117; rail- 
way lines to, 194 ; contrast be- 
tween Santiago and, 217. 



D 



"Dago" and "Gringo," use of the 

words, 506. 
Dances, primitive heathen, 130, 185, 

467-468. 
Darwin, Charles, Voyage of the Beagle 

by, 294 n. 
Darwin, Mt., 293. 
Davis, John, discoverer of Falkland 

Isles, 311. 
Dawson, T. C, The South American 

Republics by, 587. 
Death rate, Canal Zone, 29 ; a high, 

among Indians of South America, 

236-237, 457-458, 566. 



De Lesseps, Ferdinand, 4, 18. 

Delimitation Award, 449. 

Democracies, impossibility of exist- 
ence of real, in Spanish American 
states, 539. 

Denis, Pierre, work on Brazil by, 588. 

Desaguadero River, 126, 143-144; 
Indians on lagoons of the, 183. 

Deseado, Cabo (Cape Pilar), 285, 
290, 291. 

Deserts, 40-41, 75 ; in Bolivia, 167, 
196; scenery on, 196-197; of 
Argentina, 266-267. 

Desolation Island, 291, 293, 295. 

Diaz, Bartholomew, 283. 

Diaz, Porfirio, 532 n., 548 ; auto- 
cratic government of, the form best 
suited for Mexico, 542-543. 

Dictatorships in young South Ameri- 
can republics, 538-539. 

Dominican missionaries, 464-465. 

Drake, Sir Francis, 15, 17 ; attack of 
Araucanians on, 235; passage of 
Straits of Magellan by, 286. 

Dramas of ancient Peruvians, 155- 
156. 

Dress, of Indians of Peru, 89 ; of 
Indians at La Paz, 175-176 ; of 
Gauchos, 328. 

Drought, the risk of, in Argentina, 
333, 557 n. 

Dry farming, 330. 

Dumas, Alexandre, a saying of, 
quoted, 490. 

Dungeness, Cape, Tierra del Fuego, 
305. 

Duties, protective, in Brazil, 413. 



E 



Earthquakes, freedom of Panama 
from, 24; prevalence of, at Lima, 
48 ; at Arequipa, 64 ; at Valparaiso, 
203 ; at Mendoza, 262 ; absence 
of, at Buenos Aires, 317. 

Earth Spirit of Indian tribes, 185, 
466. 

Easter Island, figures on, compared 
with figures at Tiahuanaco, 150. 

Eastern Cordillera, 188. 

East Indian coolies in Guiana, 564 n. 

Ecuador, 39, 40, 76, 342; question 
of true national qualities of, 442 ; 
not a country for immigrants, 555. 

Eden, Decades of the New World by, 
303. 



598 



INDEX 



Education, comparatively small pro- 
vision made for in South America, 
575 ; the outlook for a wider, 579- 
580. 

Edwards, A., Panama by, 588. 

Elliot, Scott, History of Chile by, 
587. 

Encomienda, system of the, 455. 

English, residing at La Paz, 179 ; at 
Valparaiso, 215-216 ; adverse crit- 
icism on, quoted, 216 ; at Buenos 
Aires, 321 ; in Argentina, 340-341 ; 
in state of Sao Paulo, 377 ; lack of 
sympathy of feeling between South 
Americans and, 506 ; influence of, 
restricted to commercial relations, 
517-518. See also British. 

English names of headlands, bays, 
and channels of Straits of Magel- 
lan, 292-293. 

English Reach, Straits of Magellan, 
293, 298. 

Ercilla, Alonzo de, Araucana of, 
236. 

Espiritu Santo, Cape, 305. 

Estates of great landowners, Chile, 
220-221; in Argentina, 331-333. 

Eucalyptus trees in South America, 
92-93, 176-177, 335, 353. 

Evangelists, islands called, 290. 

Export duties on nitrates, 209. 



Falkland Isles, visit to, 308-314; 
sheep industry predominant on, 
310 ; possibilities for development 
of, 310-311 ; chequered history of, 
311-312; present form of govern- 
ment, 312 ; impressions of nature 
obtained at, 313-314. 

Farming country, Argentina, 329- 
330. See Agriculture. 

Ferro Carril Transandino, 251. 

Fevers, Isthmus of Panama, 3 ; 
preventive measures, Canal Zone, 
28-30 ; at Guayaquil, 40. 

Fitzgerald, E. A., High Andes by, 
258 n. 

Fitzroy, Cape, 292. 

Flor del Inca, shrub called, 133. 

Flowers, Isthmus of Panama, 7 ; 
in forests of southern Chile, 243, 
244, 245, 246 ; of Brazil, 391-394. 

Flying fish, 43. 

Forests, of Colombia and Ecuador, 



39 ; of the Amazon, 75-76 ; of 
Brazil, 390-394 ; of southern Chile, 
241-247; of the Selvas, 558- 
560. 

Formosa, Cape, 291. 

Fortifications, Panama Canal, 19, 
32-33. 

Francia, Jose Caspar Rodriguez, 465, 
525, 584. 

Franciscan monks, Copacavana, 129. 

Frazer, J. G., Golden Bough by, cited, 
159 n. 

Free trade, an issue in Brazil, 413. 

French, attempts of, to construct 
Panama Canal, 18, 31-32 ; mining 
carried on by, at Pulucayo, 195 ; 
copper-smelting at Corral by, 229 ; 
residing at Coillelfu, 244 ; on 
the Falkland Isles, 311-312; 
colony at Buenos Aires, 321 ; 
in Argentina, 340 ; in state of 
Sao Paulo, 377 ; influence of, in 
things intellectual and social, 518- 
520 ; spread of language and litera- 
ture of, in South America, 576. 

Froward, Cape, 293, 298, 305. 

Fuegian Indians, 292, 294. 

Fury Island, 293. 



G 



Gama, Vasco da, voyage of, as com- 
pared with that of Magellan, 282. 

Garden, at Lota, 227-228 ; Botanical 
Garden at Buenos Aires, 319; 
at Montevideo, 353-354; at Rio 
de Janeiro, 382. 

Garden Mountain, the, 201. 

Garibaldi, story of fighting by, in 
Uruguay, 358. 

Gatun Dam, 6, 21-22, 23-24. 

Gaucho horsemen, Argentina, 321, 
328; in Uruguay, 355-356; in 
Brazil, 406. 

Gavea, Mt., 383. 

Germans in South America, 102 ; 
at La Paz, 179 ; at Valparaiso, 215- 
216 ; at Valdivia, 229 ; immigra- 
tion of, into Chile, 239, 438; at 
Osorno, 239 ; at Buenos Aires, 321 ; 
in Argentina, 340-341 ; in state 
of Sao Paulo, 377 ; large number 
of, in Rio Grande do Sul, 406 ; 
in Brazil, 438; in Uruguay, 438; 
a factor to be reckoned with com- 
mercial!*,' in Brazil and South 



INDEX 



599 



America generally, 510 n. ; influ- 
ence of, restricted to commercial 
relations, 517-518. 

Glaciers, Andean, 84, 85 ; of Cor- 
dillera Real, 141, 143; on Mt. 
Illimani, 176 ; on Mt. Aconcagua, 
249, 258 ; on mountains along 
Straits of Magellan, 295, 296. 

Goethals, Colonel, 26-27, 30. 

Gold, in Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, 
192 ; retardation of real develop- 
ment of Spanish America caused 
by, 493. 

Gold Hill, 21, 25 n. 

Gorgas, Colonel, 29. 

Governments of Spanish American 
states, effect of physical conditions 
on, 527-528 ; of racial conditions, 
528-531 ; of economic and social 
conditions, 532-534 ; of historical 
conditions during the colonial 
period, 534-536 ; of historical 
conditions at close of War of Inde- 
pendence, 536-539 ; have never 
been real democracies, 539-540 ; 
question of what form might have 
been preferable, 540-541 ; three 
classes of states under republican 
forms, 541—545 ; encouragement 
to be got from Chile and Argentina, 
543-546 ; states still unfitted for 
popular self-government, 547-548 ; 
leniency called for in judging 
Spanish American, 549-551. 

Graham Land, 284. 

Gran Chaco, the, 327, 329, 338, 478 ; 
plagues of locusts emanating from, 
334. 

"Gringo," use of word, 506. 

Guanacos, in Tierra del Fuego, 304; 
in Argentina, 326. 

Guano, 42, 45-46 ; a source of evil 
to Peru, 209. 

Guaqui, Bolivia, 125, 144, 169. 

Guarani Indians in Paraguay, 441, 
459. 

Guayaquil, city of, 40, 589. 

Guayaquil, Gulf of, 38-39, 40. 



Hale, Albert, The South Americans 
by, 510, 588. 

Half-breeds, in Brazil, 407-408; 
social status of, in South America, 
472-473 ; a negligible quantity in 



I North America, 491-492. See 

I Mestizos and Mulattoes. 

Hanko Uma, peak of, 142. 

Harvard Observatory, Arequipa, 61. 

Hayti, government of, 542. 

Himalaya Mountains, comparisons 

i between Andes and, 276-277. 

Hindus in British Guiana, 438. 

Hirst, W. A., Argentina by, 588. 

Horse-racing, in Chile, 221-222 ; at 
Buenos Aires, 318, 345 ; in Brazil, 
415. 

Horses, importance of, in Uruguayan 
insurrections, 359 ; found on Pam- 
pas of Argentina, 327, 328; num- 
bers of, in Argentina, 336 n. 

Hotel accommodations, 589. 

Houses, adobe, 41, 88, 123; cane and 
reed, Lima, 47-48 ; ancient Peru- 
vian, 131-132. 

Huaca, sacred object (fetish), 139. 

Huanchaca, 195. 

Huayna Capac, Inca sovereign, 111. 

Huayna Potosi, Mt., 142, 187. 

Huillca of ancient Peruvians, 157. 

Humboldt current, the, 38, 39, 43, 
45, 489. 



Ilacata, Indian official, 180. 

lies Malouines, French name for 
Falkland Isles, 311. 

Illampu, Mt. (Sorata), 57, 134, 141- 
142. 

Illimani, Mt., 134, 142, 176, 177, 186, 
188. 

Immigration, to southern Chile, 239- 
241; to Argentina, 338-339; of 
Germans and Italians to Brazil, 
405-407 ; of Portuguese, Span- 
iards, and Syrians, 407 ; slight 
effect of, on national differentiation 
in South America, 437-438 ; from 
Spain, 514; of Italians to Argen- 
tina and Brazil, 516 ; mountainous 
parts of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia 
unsuited for, 555 ; the three sec- 
tions of South America to be 
regarded as a field for, 555 ; pre- 
eminent fitness of Argentina, Uru- 
guay, and southern Brazil, 556- 
557 ; room for, to Chile, 557-558 ; 
the Amazonian Selvas considered 
with a view to, 560-562. 

Incas, the, 41, 44, 45, 46, 60, 92, 94; 



600 



INDEX 



civilization of the, 78-79 ; ancient 
highway of the, 86 ; traces of empire 
of, at Cuzco, 102-118; stories of the 
gold of the, 110; depth of the fall 
of the, 114-115; relics of, at 
Copacavana, 128-130; on Sacred 
Isles, Lake Titicaca, 132, 133, 135- 
139 ; Sacred Rock honoured as the 
ancient home of race of, 139 ; 
traces of people who antedated 
the, at Tiahuanaco, 149-150; 
type of civilization of, compared 
with that of Aztecs, 160 ; adminis- 
tration of government, roads, rest- 
houses, etc., of, 160-161; political 
astuteness of, 161-162 ; disastrous 
results of overthrow of, by Spanish, 
162 ; destruction of people of, 162- 
163 ; question of completeness of 
development of semi-civilization of, 
when overthrown, 164-165 ; be- 
longed to the Quichua race of In- 
dians, 183 ; naming of unusual nat- 
ural phenomena after the, 258-259. 

Inca's Bridge, the, 258-259. 

Indian runners, service of, under the 
Incas, 60, 161. 

Indians, prehistoric, 3, 13 ; of San 
Bias, 13-14; on Isthmus of 
Panama, 13-14 ; at Arequipa, 66 ; 
enslavement of, by rubber pro- 
ducers, 76, 458; as shepherds, 
Peru, 81, 83 ; of towns in interior 
of Peru, 84; at Sicuani, 88-92; 
predominance of, at Cuzco, 101- 
102 ; of central plateau of Peru, 
121-124 ; inferiority of Andean, 
compared with other tribes, 159- 
160; in Bolivia, 168; large pro- 
portion of, among population of 
La Paz, 179 ; present condition of 
aborigines in Andean regions, 
180 ff. ; tribal organization of, 
180-1S1, 461-462; Jlacatas and 
Alcaldes of, 180-181 ; illiteracy of, 
181-182, 468; indulgence in alco- 
hol and more especially in coca- 
leaf chewing, 181-182 ; two divi- 
sions of, the Quichuas and the 
Aymaras, 182-184 ; characteristics 
of, 184-185 ; religion of, 185 ; feel- 
ings toward white men, 185-186 ; 
fusion of, with white race in Chile, 
232; the Araucanians, 232-238; 
to south of Araucanians, 238-239 ; 
on islands off south Chilean coast, 



288, 478; along Straits of Magel- 
lan, 294 ; of the Pampas of Argen- 
tina, 326, 327, 338; among the 
police of Buenos Aires, 343 ; of 
Uruguay, 355 ; of Brazil, 367, 369 ; 
statistics of, in Brazil, 408 n. ; 
influence of, on differentiating 
various parts of Spanish America 
from one another into separate 
nations, 432-433 ; have nothing 
to do with government of countries 
they inhabit, 439, 469-470, 529; 
constitute an economic factor of 
the first magnitude except in 
Argentina and Uruguay, 454 ; 
attitude of Spanish conquerors 
toward, 454-456; vast differences 
in qualities of aboriginal, 456-457 ; 
present numbers of, 457 ; propor- 
tion of, in population of Mexico 
and South America, 458^160 ; 
numbers of wild tribes, 460 ; civil 
and ecclesiastical oppression of, 
under the Spaniards and later, 
460-465; religion of, 462-466; 
work of Dominicans and Jesuits 
among, 464-465 ; attitude toward 
Christianity, 465-466 ; indulgence 
of, in drinking and dancing, 467- 
468 ; safety of white people among, 
468-469 ; relations between whites 
and, in Paraguay, 470-473 ; con- 
stitute separate nationalities from 
those of the combined white and 
mestizo, 474 ; retardation of in- 
dustrial and intellectual progress 
by, 475-476, 580-581; effect of 
intermarriage with, on the Spanish 
stock, 476-477 ; Peruvian Indians 
free from bloodthirstiness, 477 ; 
of the Selvas, 559 ; estimated total 
number in whole continent, 564 ; 
rate of increase of, 566. 

Indios bravos, wild Indians, 460, 470, 
530 n. 

Inquisition, hall of the, Lima, 50. 

Insurrections, South American and 
other, 359-361, 362-363. See also 
Revolutions. 

Intensive cultivation, postponement 
of fear of overpopulation by, 554. 

Intermarriage, of whites and Indians 
in Paraguay, 471 ; effect of, on 
quality of Spanish stock, 476-477, 
530-531 ; between whites and 
negroes in Brazil, 480. 



INDEX 



601 



Invention, lack of, in ancient Peru- 
vians, 155. 

Inventors, esteem of Spanish Ameri- 
cans for scientists as, 581. 

Iodine, a by-product of nitrate, 208. 

Iquitos, town of, 559. 

Irrigation, Lima, 47 ; at Mendoza, 
263. 

Isabella the Catholic, statue of, re- 
turned to Spain, 515. 

Island of the Sun, Lake Titicaca, 132- 
140. 

Isthmuses, interest attached to, geo- 
graphically and commercially, 1-2. 

Italians, at Mendoza, 263 ; increas- 
ing numbers of, in Argentina, 264- 
265, 438; in Buenos Aires, 321- 
322 ; as labourers in Argentina, 
332-333; distribution of, in Ar- 
gentina, 339 ; birth-rate among 
immigrants, 339 ; question of 
influence of, on future nation, 339- 
340; in Uruguay, 355; in Sao 
Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, 376- 
377, 406-407 ; slight effect of, on 
political and intellectual life in 
South America, 516-517. 

Italiaya, Mt., 368. 



Japanese, slight immigration of, to 

South America, 438 ; remoteness of 

danger from, 504. 
Jesuit annalist quoted, 63-64. 
Jesuits, churches of, in Peru, 67, 98- 

99 ; mission work of, among the 

Indians, 464-465. 
Jockey Club, Bueuus Aires, 318. 
John VI of Portugal, 410. 
Johnson, Sir H. H., on coloured race 

in Brazil, 408 n. 
Juarez, Benito, 184, 521, 585. 
Jujuy, town of, 330, 478. 
Juliaca, village of, 84. 
Juncal, town of, 254, 270. 
Juncal Valley, the, 271. 
Jungle, Isthmus of Panama, 6-7 ; of 

Amazonian plain, 75, 76, 393-394. 



K 



Kaka Aka, Mt., 142. 
Koati (Koyata), Island of the Moon, 
Lake Titicaca, 131-132. 



Koebel, W. H., Uruguay by, 588. 



Labourers, Panama Canal, 26 n., 27- 
30 ; negro, on Brazilian cotton and 
sugar plantations, 404-405 ; in 
coffee, cattle, and cereal regions of 
Brazil, 405-407 ; importance of 
Indian population as, 454. 

Ladrone Islands, Magellan reaches 
the, 285. 

Lakes in southern Chile, 246-247. 

Landowners, class of great, in Chile, 
220-221; in Argentina, 331-333; 
absence of a middle class of small, 
in South America, 532-533. 

La Paz, 121, 141, 144; population, 
168 ; the approach to, 168-169 ; 
site called Our Lady of Peace, 170 ; 
choice of singular site of, 170-171 ; 
altitude of, 171 ; effects on stran- 
gers of altitude, 172-174; streets, 
churches, houses, and people, 174- 
176 ; fascination of strange scenes 
and scenery at, 176-178 ; museum 
at, 178 ; legislative session at, 178- 
179 ; contrast between Santiago 
and, 217. 

La Plata, University of, 575. 

La Raya, pass of, 85. 

Larden, Walter, work by, 588. 

Las Cuevas, 257, 267, 269. 

La Serena, town of, 211. 

Las Heras, Colonel, 280. 

Latin America and Teutonic America, 
490. See Americas. 

Lautaro, Araucanian chief, 184, 235. 

Lemaire, Neveu, work by, cited, 191. 

Leopoldina Railway, 386-390. 

Lignite coal near Punta Arenas, 300. 

Lima, ancient importance of, 46-47 ; 
situation, 47 ; streets and houses, 
47-48 ; square and cathedral, 48- 
50 ; notable buildings, 49-50 ; 
University of, 50 ; climate, 50-51 ; 
gaiety and social enjoyment at, 
51-52 ; Spanish air retained by, 
52-53 ; lack of evidences of the 
past and lack of progress at, 53 ; 
contrast between Santiago and, 
217 ; society in, for the protection 
of the Indians, 470 n. 

Limon, Bay of, 6, 20. 

Linseed, production of, in Argentina, 
336. 



602 



INDEX 



Literature, of ancient Peruvians, 155- 
156 ; place of, in Argentina, 344 ; 
influence of the French on South 
American, 518-519 ; comparative 
smallness of output, 576 ; out- 
look for, 578-580. 

Llai Llai, station of, 251. 

Llamas, Peru, 65, 77, 81, 86, 92, 94; 
droppings of, used as fuel, 121 ; 
at La Paz, 169, 176, 177. 

Loa River, 202. 

Locks, Panama Canal, 22, 23, 24, 
31 n. 

Locusts, plagues of, 333-334, 557. 

Long Reach, Straits of Magellan, 
293, 295. 

Lopez, Francisco Solano, 465 n., 
525, 545, 584. 

Los Patos Pass, 268. 

Lota, town of, 227, 286 ; garden at, 
227-228. 

Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 283. 

Lumbering on the Amazonian plain, 
559-560. 

Lusiad, Camoens', 416. 

Lynch, Patricio, 230. 

Lynching practically unknown in 
South America, 480. 



M 



Macchu Pichu, ruins at, 113. 

Machete, cutlass-like knife, 7, 385. 

Madre de Dios River, 194. 

Magellan, Ferdinand, remarkable 
voyage of, 282, 291-292, 305, 486 ; 
discovery and exploration of Straits 
of Magellan by, 284-286, 297- 
298, 299 ; great geographical im- 
portance of voyage of, 307. 

Magellan, Straits of, discovery, 282- 
286 ; Francis Drake's passage of, 
286 ; account of trip from Lota, 
Chile, to, 286-290; entrance to, 
from the west, 290-291 ; English 
names of headlands, bays, and 
channels of, 292-293; mountains 
along the, 293, 295-297; First 
and Second Narrows, 304-305; 
general physical character of, 305- 
307. 

Maine, Sir Henry, work on Popular 
Government by, 524-525. 

Maize, on central plateau of Peru, 
120; in Argentina, 336; in Uru- 
guay, 351. 



Maize Mother in Peruvian mythol- 
ogy, 157. 

Malarial fever, Guayaquil, 40. 

Malthusian theory, question of cor- 
rectness of; 554. 

Mamelucos, half-breeds called, 407. 

Manaos, town of, 559. 

Manco Capac, Inca sovereign, 108, 
137, 138. 

Manufacturing, small amount of, in 
Argentina, 336. 

Mapoche Indians, 233, 236, 238. 
See Araucanian Indians. 

Maranon River, 86. 

Markham, Sir C, works on South 
America by, 147 n., 587. 

Marriage between races, 471, 480. 
See Intermarriage. 

Marriage fees imposed on Indians, 
461. 

Maule River, 225. 

Maya Indians, 13. 

Meat-packing, Argentina, 336 ; Uru- 
guay, 354. 

Medanos, sand hills, 58-59. 

Medina, Jose Torribio, historian and 
bibliographer, 221. 

Megillones, 202, 210-211. 

Mendoza, Spanish governor, 249. 

Mendoza, town of, 249, 250, 253, 
256, 261, 280; location and grow- 
ing importance of, 261-262 ; de- 
scription of, 261-263 ; beauty of 
scenery at, 265-266. 

Mendoza River, 262. 

Merced, church of, Cuzco, 98-99. 

Mercedario, Mt., altitude of, 260 n. 

Mestizos, half-breeds of Spanish and 
Indians, 90-91 ; position of, re- 
garding Indians, 186 ; proportion 
of, in population of Mexico, Peru, 
and South America generally, 
458-460; social status of, 472- 
473 ; forceful leaders found among, 
477 ; estimated total number of, 
in the continent, 564 ; numerical 
predominance of (excepting in 
Argentina and Uruguay), 565; 
rate of increase of, 566 ; predomi- 
nance of the white element in, 
566-567. 

Mexican War, suspicions of South 
America against United States 
aroused by, 447, 497, 508. 

Mexico, ruins in Peru contrasted 
with those in, 106, 113 ; the quali- 



INDEX 



603 



ties of a true nation possessed by, 
441- proportion of Indians in 
population of, 458; secret idol 
worship in, 466 ; characteristics of 
Indians of, 474 ; to be grouped with 
■ South America rather than North, 
490 ; impossibility of existence of 
a real democracy in, 539; suit- 
ability of Diaz' autocratic form of 
government for, 542-543. 
Military school, University of La 

Plata, 575. 
Minas Geraes, state of, Brazil, 37U. 
Minas Geraes, battleship, 396-399. 
Mineral springs, Aguas Calientes, 87. 
Mines, silver and copper, Peru, 42. 
Mining, at Oruro, Bolivia, 189; 
condition of, in Argentina, 336; 
evils to early Spanish America 
resulting from, 493-494. 
Miraflores, Isthmus of Panama, 22, 

27. 
Misti, volcano, Peru, 56-57, 60, 61, 

63, 81, 82, 392. 
Mita, personal service rendered land- 
lords by Indians, 462. 
Mitla, comparison of ruins of, with 

ruins at Cuzco, 106. 
Mitre, Historia de San Martin by, 

281. 
Mochica Indians, 457. 
Mochica language, 44, 183. 
Mollendo, town of, 54-55, 187, 215. 
Monolithic gateway at Tiahuanaco, 

146-147. 
Monroe Doctrine, 508-510. 
Montana, district called the, 75. 
Montevideo, 314; description of, 
351-354; population, 352; Uni- 
versity of, 575 ; expense of living 
in, 589. 
Moon, Island of, Lake Titicaca, 131- 

132 
Moon, worship of, by Peruvians, 157. 
Morgan, English buccaneer, 12, 15- 

16, 17. 
Moses, Bernard, works by, quoted 

and cited, 463-464, 587. 
Mosquitoes, preventive measures 

against, in Canal Zone, 28-29. 
Mountain climbers, Andes consid- 
ered from viewpoint of, 272. 
Mountains, Isthmus of Panama, 7-8 ; 
Andes, 38, 39, 42, 47; Western 
Cordillera of Andes, 55-58, 60, 61, 
63, 77-87, 198, 203 ; Coast Range, 



81, 224, 225, 297 ; Cordillera Real, 
127, 141-143 ; attitude of aborigi- 
nes' toward, in the way of names, 
142-143 ; Eastern Cordillera, 188 ; 
along Straits of Magellan, 293, 
295-297; Brazilian Coast Range, 
368; about Rio de Janeiro, 379- 
381, 384-386. See also Andes. 

Mountain sickness, 83, 172. 

Mulattoes, estimated total number 
of, in the continent, 564 ; predomi- 
nance of the white element in, 
566-567. 

Mummies, Peruvian, 107, 157. 

Museum, at La Paz, 178. 

Museums, inferiority of South Ameri- 
can, 376. 

Mussulmans, negroes of Brazil as, 
409 n. 

Mutiny on battleships at Rio de 
Janeiro, 395-400. 

Mythology of primitive Peruvians, 
156-159. 



N 



Napoleon III, theories of, concerning 

the "Latin" peoples, 512 n. 
Nassau Bay, 293. 

Nations, the division of Spanish 
America into, 422-424 ; question of 
what constitutes, 424-426; lines 
of old administrative divisions a 
primary factor in determining ter- 
ritorial limits in Spanish America, 
427-428; influence of geograph- 
ical position in differentiating, 
429-430 ; influence of physical en- 
vironment, 430-431; effect of pres- 
ence of aboriginal tribes, 432-434 ; 
effect of War of Independence and 
later civil wars, 434-436 ; effect of 
conditions of industrial and com- 
mercial life, 437; position of dif- 
ferent Spanish-American countries 
as true nations, 438 ff. ; judged by 
the test of possessing a distinctive 
national character and a strong 
national sentiment, 439-443 ;_ test 
of creative activities in art, science, 
and letters applied to South Ameri- 
can republics, 443 ; question con- 
cerning the sense of a common His- 
pano- American nationality, 444 ff. 
Naval harbour of Talcahuano, Chile, 
226-227. 



604 



INDEX 



Navies of South American countries, 
449. 

Negroes, West Indian, as labourers 
on Panama Canal, 26 n. ; living 
in Peru, 66 ; in Uruguay, 355 ; 
in state of Sao Paulo, 376 ; in 
Bahia, Pernambuco, and other 
cities, 401; in Brazil, 401, 404- 
405, 40S, 456 ; status of, as com- 
pared with coloured race in United 
States, 414-415, 472-475, 479- 
480 ; influence of, felt as a race 
factor, 433-434 ; numbers of, in 
all South America, 459 n., 564. 

New Granada, Republic of, 17. 

New South Wales, decrease in birth- 
rate of, 563 n. 

Newspapers, Argentine, 344. 

Nictheroy, town of, 378, 390. 

Nitrates, deposits of, 42, 202, 206; 
account of work in fields, 207- 
208; export duties on, 209; 
question of benefits of this natural 
wealth, 209-210. 

Nombre de Dios, 5, 14, 15. 

North Americans at La Paz, 179. 
See under Americas. 

Norway, scenery of Straits of Magel- 
lan compared with that of, 296. 

Novo Friburgo, town of, 389. 

Nuestra Sefiora de los Dolores, con- 
vent of, Arequipa, 69. 



O 



Oca, grown on central plateau of 

Peru, 120. 
Ocean currents, 489. 
O'Higgins, Bernardo, 230. 
Oil wells, Piura, 41. 
Ollague, Mt., 198, 199. 
OUantay, drama of, 156. 
Ollantaytambo, ruins at, 113. 
Ornate, volcano of, 63, 64 n. 
Ona tribe of Patagonian Indians, 

303-304, 478. 
Orchids, Isthmus of Panama, 7 ; 

in Brazilian forests, 393. 
Organ Mountains (Serra dos Orgaos), 

381, 384-385. 
Oribe, General, 357. 
Oriental quality in Spanish-American 

cities, 65-GG. 
Oruro, town of, 168, 183, 189-190. 
Osorno, town of, 224, 239. 



(Our Lady of Peace, original name 

^ given to La Paz, 170. 

Overpopulation, the danger of, 552- 
554 ; partial solution of problem 
of, by intensive cultivation, devel- 
opments of chemical science, and 
decline in birth-rate, 554-555 ; 
South America viewed as a means 
of postponing menace of, 555 ff. 



Pachacamac, Earth God of Peru- 
vians, 156. 

Pachacamac, Peru, excavations at, 
153-154. 

Pacific Steam Navigation Company, 
54. 

Paganism, among Andean tribes, 
158, 467. 

Palace of the Inca Roca, Cuzco, 104- 
105. 

Palace of the Viceroys, Lima, 49. 

Palace of the Virgins of the Sun, 
Koati, 132. 

Palacios, Dr., Raza Chilena by, 
cited, 531. 

Palenque, comparison of ruins of, 
with ruins at Cuzco, 106. 

Palermo, park at Buenos Aires, 318- 
319. 

Pampaconas River, ruins on the, 
113 n. 

Pampa of Peru, 5S-59 ; of Argentina, 
262, 266. 

Pampas of Argentina, 324-325 ; 
horses and cattle on the, 327 ; 
Gauchos on the, 328 ; agricultural 
possibilities of, 333-334 ; monot- 
ony of scenery, 334-335. 

Panama, city of, 9, 11, 12, 15-16, 19. 

Panama, Isthmus of, 1-36. 

Panama, Republic of, 14, 18-19, 
503. 

Panama Canal , 4-5 ; French at- 
tempts to construct, 18 ; enter- 
prise taken over by United States, 
18-19 ; length, breadth, and width, 
20; description of the four sec- 
tions, 20-23 ; the Culebra Cut, 20- 
22, 23, 24-26; the Gatun dam, 
23-24 ; labourers and conditions 
of labour, 26 ff . ; mortality rate, 
29; importance of sanitation of 
Canal Zone, 30 ; cost of canal, 32 ; 
fortifying of, 32-33 ; effect of, on 



INDEX 



605 



international trade, 33-35 ; the 
last of large changes in earth's 
surface, 35-36. 

Panama Railway, 5-9, 12, 17-18. 

Pan Americanism, 488. 

Pan American Union, 511 n. ; publi- 
cations issued by, 588. 

Pan de Azucar, Rio de Janeiro, 380. 

Pando, General, 179. 

Paraguay, question of true national 
qualities of, 441 ; despotisms of 
Francia and Lopez in, 465 ; social 
relations of white and Indian races 
in, 470-472. 

Paraguay River, 326. 

Parahyba River, 386, 387 ; scenery 
along the, 388-389. 

Paramo, bleak regions between 
valleys in Peru, 79 n. 

Parana, state of, 403. 

Parana River, 167, 316, 326, 429. 

Paris, the Mecca of South American 
pleasure-seekers, 519. 

Patagonia, 284; aborigines of, 303- 
304, 327. 

Paterson, William, 16. 

Patriotism of Argentines, 346. 

Payne, B. J., chapters on Peru by, 
587. 

Payta, Peru, 40-42, 54. 

Pearl Islands, 10, 37. 

Pedrarias, Spanish viceroy, 11, 14. 

Pedro I of Brazil, 410; statue of, 
376. 

Pedro II of Brazil, 384, 410. 

Pedro Miguel, Isthmus of Panama, 
22. 

Pelucon, the word, 232 n. 

" Penitentes " in the Andes, 259-260. 

Peons in Argentina, 332. 

Peru, coast of, 37 ff. ; coast towns, 
44 ; ruins, 44-45, 152 ff . ; moun- 
tains of Western Cordillera, 55-58 ; 
great inner plateau of, 58-60 ; 
central Peru, 77 ff. ; height of 
central plateau, 77 ; area and pop- 
ulation, 78 ; plateau surrounding 
Lake Titicaca, 119-124; distinc- 
tion between Bolivia and, purely 
arbitrary, 121-122 ; antiquity of 
the semi-civilization of, 149-151 ; 
disadvantages of isolated position 
of, as to civilization, 151 ; reasons 
for importance of prehistoric re- 
mains in, 152-153 ; discussion of 
religion, mythology, and semi- 



civilization of primitive inhabi- 
tants of, 152-165 ; true national 
qualities possessed by, 441 ; pro- 
portion of Indians in population 
of, 458 ; not a country for immi- 
grants to turn toward, 555. 

Peruvian Corporation, the, 80. 

Petrels seen on voyage to Straits of 
Magellan, 287. 

Petropolis, 384, 385. 

Philip II of Spain, 4, 36. 

Pichu Pichu, Mt., 56, 60, 62. 

Pigafetta, Magellan's chronicler, 284, 
285; quoted, 285-286, 303. 

Pilar, Cape (Magellan's Cabo Dese- 
ado), 290, 291. 

Pinzon, Martin Alonso, 96, 367, 494. 

Pisac, ruins at, 113. 

Piura, town of, 41. 

Piura, valley of, ancient population, 
44. 

Pizarro, Francisco, 11-12, 37, 39, 
44, 46, 47, 60, 96, 97, 102, 103 n., 
192, 307, 494 ; assassination of, 
49; massacre of Atahuallpa's fol- 
lowers by, 98. 

Pizarro, Gonzalo, 96, 170, 494. 

Plata, Rio de la, 167, 284, 316, 486 ; 
advantages to Montevideo from 
the, 351-352. 

Plaza, La Paz, 175. 

Plaza de Armas, Lima, 48-49. 

Plazas, Cuzco, 96-97. 

Politics, interest in, in Chile, 221 ; 
in Argentina, 344 ; in Uruguay, 
358-359. 

Polo-playing, Valparaiso, 214-215. 

Poncho, dress of Gauchos, 328. 

Poopo, Lake, 124, 126, 190-191, 
488. 

Population, growth of, of cities, 322- 
323 ; questions raised by the 
growth of, 552 ff . ; forecasts of 
growth of, in South America, 562- 
565 ; estimates of total number of 
whites, Indians, negroes, mestizos, 
and mulattoes, 564-565 ; of the 
future will be white rather than 
negro or Indian, 567-569. See 
Races. 

Portenos and Campos, Argentina, 
323. 

Torter, R. P., Ten Republics by, 
588. 

Port Louis, Falkland Isles, 312. 

Port St. Julian, 303. 



606 



INDEX 



Port Stanley, Falkland Isles, 308- 

309, 313. 
Portuguese, in Uruguay, 349, 350 ; 

explanation of possession of Brazil 

by, 366-367. 
Potatoes, raised on central plateau of 

Peru, 120, 122. 
Potosi, 168 ; silver mining at, 192. 
Pottery, Peruvian, 106. 
Prehistoric monuments at Tiahuan- 

aco, 144-148. See Ruins. 
Protection, economic issue of, in 

Brazil, 413. 
Protector of the Indians, office of, 

237. 
Puente del Inca, 258-259. 
Puerto Bello, 5. 
Puerto Montt, 206. 
Pulucayo, mine at, 195. 
Puna, mountain sickness, 172. 
Puno, port on Lake Titicaca, 84, 125. 
Puno, the, 77, 84. ' 
Punta Arenas (Sandy Point), 284, 

300 ; the commercial centre of 

southern South America, 300-301. 



Q 



Quebradas, narrow glens, of the 
Andes, 224. 

Quichua Indians, 90, 101-102, 110, 
121 ; one of the two divisions of 
Indians found by Spanish, 183- 
184 ; present condition of, 460- 
462 ; isolated social position of, 
474-475. 

Quinoa, grown on central plateau of 
Peru, 120. 

Quipus, knotted strings of various 
colours used by primitive Peru- 
vians, 160. 



R 



Races, mixture and numbers, in 
Brazil, 407-410, 414-415; discus- 
sion of relations between, in South 
America generally, 452-483 ; dif- 
ference in relations between, in 
South America and United States, 
470-475 ; conclusions on relations 
of the, 480-483; favourable or 
unfavourable results of commin- 
gling of, 530-531 ; total population 
of the continent according to, 564- 
665; questions as to their respec- 



tive increase, as to continuation 
of their intermingling, as to which 
type predominates in persons of 
mixed race, and as to ultimate 
outcome of the mixture, 566-567. 

Rafts of Totora, Lake Titicaca, 125, 
141. 

Railways: Panama Ry, 5-9, 12, 17-18 ; 
in Peru, 41, 54, 55-56, 59; South- 
ern Railroad of Peru, 80-86, 125 ; 
Bolivian, 168-169, 186-187, 191- 
192, 193-194; Chilean, 223-224, 
244, 588; Transandine line, 249- 
261; Argentine, 264, 329, 337, 
588 ; British capital invested in, 
337, 372-373, 517; Uruguayan, 
354, 588 ; line from Santos to Sao 
Paulo, 372-373; Sao Paulo-Rio 
Janeiro line, 377-378 ; Leopoldina 
Railway, 386-390 ; facilities for 
travel by means of, 588. 

Rainfall, Isthmus of Panama, 3 ; 
absence of, on coast of Peru, 45 ; 
in Chile, 224 ; at Punta Arenas, 
301 ; on the Pampas of Argen- 
tina, 325 ; smallness of, in Argen- 
tina, 333. 

Reds and Whites, parties called, in 
Uruguay, 357-359. 

Religion : of primitive Peruvians, 
156-159 (see under Indians) ; 
open attacks on, in Uruguay, 363- 
364 ; of Indian population, 462- 
466 ; a matter for women and 
peasants only, 582-584. 

Religious toleration in Argentina, 
342-343. 

Republics, division of Spanish Amer- 
ica into, 422 ft". ; lack of success of 
South American countries as, 524- 
526 ; impossibility of real democ- 
racies existing in Spanish-Ameri- 
can states, 539. 

Revolutions, Lima, 51-52, 53; in 
Brazil, 410-411; frequency of, in 
early South American republics, 
524-525 ; breaking the habit of, 
by a growing sense of order, 546. 

Rimac River, 47. 

Rinihue, Lake, 244, 246-247. 

Rio Blanco, station of, 270. 

Rio Branco, Baron do, 416. 

Rio de Janeiro, 216 n. ; description 
of, 378 ff. ; harbour, 378-379; 
mountain landscapes about, 379- 
381, 382-383; settlement, and 



INDEX 



607 



growth in population, 383-384 ; 
comparisons of, with ancient and 
modern European cities, 394-395 ; 
account of mutiny on battleships 
at, 395-400. 

Rio Grande do Sul, state of, 370, 
403,405. 

Rivera, General, 357. 

Roads, of the Incas, 161 ; scarcity of 
modern, for driving, 588. 

Rock of the Sun and the Wild Cat, 
shrine of, island of Titicaca, 126. 

Rodadero, the, at Cuzco, 111. 

Romero, Dr., Los Lagos de los 
Altiplanos by, 191 n. 

Root, Elihu, common Court of 
Justice for Spanish-American coun- 
tries set up through efforts of, 448 ; 
speech by, 506 n. 

Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 327, 329, 
477, 544-545, 584. 

Rosas Pata, ruins at, 113. 

Ross, Sir James, Antarctic Expedi- 
tion of, 310. 

Rotos, Chilean peasants, 208, 232 n., 
253, 502. 

Rubber, production of, on Amazonian 
plain, 75-76, 403, 559; cruelties 
perpetrated upon Indians by gath- 
erers of, 75, 458, 559. 

Ruhl, Arthur, The Other Americans 
by, 588. 

Ruins, of cities on coast of Peru, 44 ; 
of Chimu, 44 ; of walls at Cuzco, 
103, 105-106 ; of Sacsahuaman, 
106 n., 107-112, 118; of Ollan- 
taytambo, Pisac, Macchu Pichu, 
and Rosas Plata, 113 ; on Island of 
the Moon, Lake Titicaca, 131-132 ; 
Island of the Sun, 132-133; at 
Tiahuanaco, 144-151 ; summing up 
and conclusions on subject of, 151- 
165. 

Runaway nun, romance of the, 69- 
74. 

Rurales organized by Diaz, 542. 



S 



Sacred Isles, Lake Titicaca, 130-134. 

Sacred lake, a, 85-86. 

Sacred tree of Araucanian Indians, 

238. 
Sacsahuaman, fortress hill of, Cuzco, 

97 ; walls of, 106 n., 107-112, 118. 
Bahama, Mt., 188. 



St. Dominick, church and convent 
of, Cuzco, 105. 

St. George, Cape, 289. 

St. Paul, Indian village of, Lake 
Titicaca, 141. 

St.- Paul, volcano of, 201-202, 203. 

St. Peter, village of, 141. 

St. Peter, volcano of, 201-202, 203. 

St. Philip, fort of, Callao, 46. 

St. Thomas, legends of presence of, 
in South America and Mexico, 138. 

Salt marsh on plateau of southern 
Bolivia, 196-198. 

Salvador, Republic of, 503. 

San Bias, church of, Cuzco, 99. 

San Bias, Colombia, Indians of, 13- 
14. 

San Cristobal, hill of, Valparaiso, 
220. 

Sanctuary of the Rock, Lake Titi- 
caca, 135. 

Sand hills, plateau of Peru, 58-59. 

San Francisco, church of, La Paz, 
174-175. 

San Francisco, plaza of, Cuzco, 97. 

San Isidro, 299. 

San Martin, General Jose de, 49, 281 ; 
statue of, 262 ; leads army across 
the Andes, 268 ; account of pas- 
sage of the Andes, 280-281 ; trib- 
ute to character and achievements 
of, 281, 522 ; form of republican 
government favoured by, 538, 540. 

Santa Catharina, state of, 370, 403. 

Santa Cruz (de la Sierra), 168, 193. 

Santa Lucia, hill of, Santiago, 218- 
220. 

Santa Rosa, village of, Peru, 85. 

Santa Rosa de los Andes, 251, 252, 
280 ; hotel at, 589. 

Santiago, capital of Chile, 216 ff. ; 
striking position of, 216-217 ; 
description of, 217-218; hill of 
Santa Lucia at, 218-220 ; pre- 
dominating influence of, in the 
nation, 220, 221 ; social life of, 
220-221; horse-racing at, 221- 
222 ; an election in, 223 ; rainfall 
and height of Coast Range at, 224 ; 
San Martin's march upon, 280 ; 
university in, 575. 

Santissima Virgen de la Candelaria, 
image of, 129-130. 

Santo Domingo, position as a sepa- 
rate political entity determined by 
its geographical situation, 429. 



608 



INDEX 



Santos, town of, 371-372; coffee 
exported from, 372. 

Sao Paulo, city of, 216 n., 372 ; de- 
scription of, 374-377. 

Sao Paulo, state of, 370, 403, 405. 

Sclo Paulo, battleship, 396-399. 

Sarmiento, Mt., 299, 300. 

Schools, inadequate provision for, in 
Uruguay and South America gener- 
ally, 365 ; elementary, in state of 
Sao Paulo, 376. 

Science and learning, forecast con- 
cerning, in South America, 577- 
581. 

Scots, settlement of, Isthmus of 
Panama, 16 ; ubiquity of Aberdo- 
nians, 190 ; on Falkland Isles, 310. 

Sculptures, prehistoric, at Tiahuan- 
aco, 145-148, 154. 

Sea-birds, coast of Peru, 43 ; seen on 
voyage to Straits of Magellan, 287- 
288. 

Seals on coast of Falkland Isles, 311. 

Sea Reach, Straits of Magellan, 293. 

Seat of the Inca, Cuzco, 111-112. 

Seebey, F., cited, 344 n. 

Selvas (woodlands), 16S, 369 ; as a 
field for development by immigra- 
tion, 555, 558, 560-562 ; area and 
surface features, 558; vegetation 
on, 558-559; Indians of the, 559; 
production of rubber on, 559 ; 
timber trees on, 559-560. 

Serra do Mar (Sea Range), 372; 
trees of the, 390-394. 

Serra dos Orgaos, 381, 384-385. 

Setebos, discussion of the word, 303. 

Shakespeare, material found by, in 
account of Magellan's voj^age, 303. 

Sheep, farming of, in Patagonia and 
Tierra del Fuego, 300-301; on 
Falkland Isles, 310; numbers of, 
in Argentina, 336 n. 

Shrines, about Lake Titicaca, 126, 
129-130. 

Sicuani, town of, 88-92. 

Silver, mines of, in Peru, 42 ; mining 
of, in Bolivia, 189, 190, 192; ex- 
istence of, a misfortune to Spanish 
America, 493. 

Slavery, in Brazil, 404-405, 456. 

Smyth's Channel, 288, 291, 292. 

Snowy Range, 143. 

Soldier's Leap, the, 254. 

Songs of Peruvians, 155. 

Sorata, Mt. See Ulampu. 



Sorata, village of, 141, 142 ; Spanish 
city at, destroyed by Peruvian 
Indians, 467. 

Soroche, mountain sickness, 83, 172. 

Southern Railroad of Peru, 80, 125. 

Spain, restrictions placed on South 
American trade b3', 326, 513 ; 
relations of Spanish Americans 
with, 513-516 ; literature not 
supplied to her colonies by, 576. 

Spaniards, in Panama, 14-17, 35 ; 
atrocities practised by, at Cuzco, 
92, 115-117 ; fewness of, at La Paz, 
179; in Buenos Aires, 321-322; 
in Argentina, 338 ; immigration of, 
to Uruguay, 355 ; treatment of 
aboriginal population by, 454-456 ; 
decrease of Indians under regime 
of, 457. 

Spencer, Herbert, popularity of, 
among philosophically inclined 
South Americans, 581 n. 

Spirit worship among Indians, 63, 
157, 185, 466, 529. 

Squier, Travels in Peru by, cited, 
467, 587. 

Stars, worship of, by Peruvians, 157. 

Staten Island, Argentina, 293. 

State socialistic propaganda in Uru- 
guay, 363-364. 

Statues, absence of, of the Conquis- 
tadores, 515-516. 

Steamboats, Lake Titicaca, 125 ; 
on Rio Bueno, 242. 

Steamship lines, west coast of South 
America, 42, 54 ; running south 
from Chile, 288-289 ; Pacific Steam 
Navigation Company's line through 
Straits of Magellan, 308 n. ; be- 
tween Buenos Aires and Italian 
ports, 516 ; activity of Germans in 
running, to South America, 517. 

Stock exchange, Valparaiso, 215. 

Straits, interest attached to, geo- 
graphically and commercially, 1-2. 

Subterranean passages, reports of 
famous, 110-111. 

Sucre (Chuquisaca) , 193-194. 

Suez Canal, comparisons and con- 
trasts between Panama Canal and, 
2-4, 23 ; competition between Pan- 
ama route and, 34. 

Sugar, production of, in Argentina, 
336 ; region where produced, in 
Brazil, 403 ; labour on plantations 
of, 404-405. 



INDEX 



609 



Sugar Loaf, the, Rio de Janeiro, 380. 

Sun, Island of the, Lake Titicaca, 132- 
140. 

Sun, worship of, by aborigines, 113, 
157. 

Superstitions of primitive Peruvians, 
158-159. 

Swamps, Isthmus of Panama, 6, 9. 

Switzerland, solidarity of govern- 
ment of, despite its three races, 
424-425, 531 n. 

Syrian immigrants to Brazil, 407. 



Talcahuano, 210, 225, 226-227. 

Taquia, use of, as fuel, Peru, 121. 

Tarapaca, province of, 42. 

Tehuelche Indians, 303. 

Temple of the Sun, Cuzco, 105, 113, 
114. 

Temuco, 231, 235. 

Teutonic America vs. Latin America, 
490. 

Tiahuanaco (Tihuamacu), ruins at, 
144-151, 154; builders at, ante- 
dated the Incas, 149-150. 

Tibet, comparisons between Peru- 
vian plateau and, 119, 122. 

Tierra del Fuego, 300-304. 

Tijuca, Mt., 382. 

Times, London, South American 
Supplements, 588. 

Tin mining, Bolivia, 189, 190, 192. 

Tiquina, Straits of, 141. 

Tirapata, town of, S4, 194. 

Titicaca, Lake, 54, 82, 84, 86, 488; 
altitude of, 119 ; area and shape, 
120 ; coasts, depth, waters, fauna 
and flora, 124-125 ; purity of 
water, 126 ; native craft on, 125 ; 
steamboats on, 125 ; shrines about, 
126; colour of, 126-127; Sacred 
Islands in, 130-140 ; evidence of 
waters of, receding, 144. 

Titicaca Island, illiteracy of Indians 
on, 181. 

Titi Kala, Sacred Rock, at Lake 
Titicaca, 135-140. 

Titles of nobility in Latin America, 
502 n. 

Tocantins River, 558. 

Toledo, Francisco de, 115 ; census of 
Peruvian Indians taken by, 457. 

Tolls, Panama Canal, 33, 34. 

Tolorsa, Mt., 268-269. 
2b 



Totora, water plant on Lake Titicaca, 
125 ; native craft made of, 125, 
141. 

Trade, effect of Panama Canal on 
international, 33-35. 

Trade restrictions imposed by Spain, 
326, 513. 

Transandine railway line, 249-261 ; 
effect of, on traffic via Straits of 
Magellan, 301. 

Travel, facilities for, in South America, 
588-589. See Railways, Steam- 
ship lines, etc. 

Trees, Isthmus of Panama, 5-6; 
of the Montana, 75, 76 ; on central 
plateau of Peru, 120; of southern 
Chile, 244-246; Brazilian, 390- 
394 ; of the Selvas, 558-560. 

Tres Montes, headland of, 289. 

Trevelyan, G. M., work by, cited, 
358 n. 

Trolley ride down the Andes, 270— 
271. 

Trumajo, town of, 242. 

Truxillo, town of, 44; ruins of 
Chimu city near, 153-154. 

Tuberculosis, among Araucanian In- 
dians, 237; among the Onas, 478. 

Tucuman, town of, 326, 330, 478. 

Tumbez, town of, 39. 

Tunnel through the Andes, 251, 256. 

Tupac Amaru, last of the Inca line, 
92, 115, 466-467, 514. 

Tupac Amaru, a second, 92, 116. 

Tupiza, 191. 

Tupungato, Mt., 254, 268, 392 ; alti- 
tude and description, 260. 

Tussock grass, Falkland Isles, 310. 



U 



Ubinas, volcano of, 64 n., 82. 

Ucayali River, 86. 

Ulloa, Antonio, 463 n. 

Ulloa, Juan, quoted on Indians of 
Peru and Ecuador, 463. 

Underground passages, legends of, 
110-111. 

United States, people from, in Buenos 
Aires, 321 ; suspicious watch kept 
on actions of, by South American 
countries, 447, 497 ; influence of, 
used to avert hostilities between 
South American states, 449-450; 
difference in relations between 
races in South America and, 470- 



610 



INDEX 



475 ; causes of differences between 
South American republics and, 
traced from early settlement, 
488 ff. ; little change in relations 
resulting from achievement of in- 
dependence by both South Amer- 
ica and, 496-497 ; complete 
divergence of fortunes of, and 
causes, 497-500 : sole point of 
resemblance to-day their location 
in New World, 501 ; states-system 
of, has been the same as South 
American republics', 502-503 ; de- 
parture of, from original policy 
in conquering the Philippines and 
annexing Pacific islands, 502 ; 
sympathy of, extended to Spanish 
colonies in revolt against Spain, 
507, 524; Constitution of, taken 
as a model by new republics in 
Spanish America, 508, 538 ; pres- 
ent South American view of 
Monroe Doctrine of, 508-510 ; 
general attitude of South Ameri- 
cans toward, 510-512. 

Universities in Argentina, Uruguay, 
and Chile, 50, 100-101, 323, 575. 

Urcos, lake of, 111. 

Urubamba River, 86. 

Uruguay, 52 ; history of, leading up 
to independence, 349-350 ; area 
ind character of country, 350-351 ; 
economic outlook for, 354; people 
of, 355 ff. ; revolutions in, 356- 
360 ; Red and White factions, 357 ; 
growth in wealth and population, 
despite revolutions, 362-363 ; 
schemes tending toward state 
socialism in, 363-364 ; an attrac- 
tive country, whose political con- 
ditions need remedying, 364-365 ; 
true national qualities possessed 
by, 441 ; lacking in Indian popu- 
lation, 459 ;" fitness of, for immi- 
gration, 556-557 ; University of 
Montevideo in, 575. 

Uruguay River, 316, 354. 

Urus, Indian tribe, 121, 183. 

Uspallata, plain of, 260-261, 267. 

Uspallata Pass, 250, 280. 

Uyuni, 168, 183, 191, 194-197. 

V 

Valdez, Dr., 156. 

Valdivia, Pedro de, 218-219, 229; 



statue of, 220, 516; invasion ol 
Araucanians' country by, 234. 

Valdivia, town of, 224, 228-230. 

Valley of Desolation, the, 261, 267. 

Valparaiso, 39; harbour of, 212; 
description of, 212-214; flourish- 
ing commerce of, 215-216 ; com- 
parison of Germans and English at, 
215-216. 

Valverde, Vicente de, 97-98. 

Van Dyck, paintings attributed to, 
67, 97. 

Van Dyke, The Desert by, 196 n. 

Vega, Garcilaso de la, 117. 

Vegetation, in southern Chile, 241- 
247 ; on the Selvas, 558-560. 

Venezuela, question of true national 
qualities of, 442. 

Vespuccius, Americus, 367 n. ; the 
naming of the two Americas for, 
484-487. 

Viacha, railroad junction, 169, 170, 
186, 187. 

Viceroys, despotic power of Spanish, 
in South America, 535. 

Victoria, Australia, decrease in birth- 
rate of, 563 n. 

Victoria, Mt., 298. 

Vicunas, 82 ; rugs from wool of, at 
La Paz, 178. 

Vilcamayu River, 86, 92, 94, 180; 
ruins along valley of the, 113. 

Vilcafiota, Sierra of, 85, 93, 121. 

Vina del Mar, suburb of Valparaiso, 
214-215. 

Vinamarca, Lake, 141, 143. 

Vines, Mr., ascent of Aconcagua by, 
258 ; of Tupungato, 260 n. 

Vineyards, at Mendoza, 263 ; in 
Uruguay, 351. 

Viracocha, Inca sovereign, 91 n., 
95. 

Viracocha, Indian name for white 
man of superior station, 91. 

Virgenes, Cape, 284, 305, 308. 

Virgin of the Light, shrine of, Copa- 
cavana, 126. 

Virgins of the Sun, Palace of the, 
Koati, 132. 

Volcanoes: El Misti, 56-57, 60, 61, 
63, 81, 82, 392; Ornate, 63, 64 n.; 
Ubinas, 64 u., 82 ; below Sicuani, 
93; of Western Cordillera, 200- 
201. 

Voyages of Columbus, Da Gama, and 
Magellan compared, 282-284. 



INDEX 



611 



w 



Walls, ruins of, at Cuzco, 103, 105- 

106 ; of Sacsahuaman, 106 n., 107- 

112, 118; on, island of Koati, 131 ; 

at Titi Kala, 136-137. See also 

Ruins. 
War, prospects and possibilities of, 

in South America, 448-451, 569- 

570. 
War of Independence, the, 166, 327 ; 

influence of, on awakening of 

national life, 434-436. 
Waterfalls, Parahyba River, 387, 389. 
Wealth, hope for political progress in 

increase of, 546-547. 
Western Cordillera, 55-58, 198, 203. 
West Indian negroes, as labourers on 

Panama Canal, 26 n. 
Westminster Hall, island of, 292. 
Whales, coast of Peru, 43. 
Wheat, production of, in Argentina, 

336, 351. 
Wild Indians, 460, 470, 478, 530 n. 
William III of England, 16. 
Wine, made at Mendoza, 263, 336. 



Women as priests among the Arau- 

canians, 238. 
Wool, trade in, at Punta Arenas, 300- 

301 ; production of, in Uruguay, 

354. 



Yahgan tribe of Fuegians, 294. 

Yareta moss as fuel, 121, 200. 

Yellow fever, on Isthmus of Panama, 
3 ; measures taken against, 28-29 ; 
in city of Guayaquil, 40; former 
inroads of, at Santos, 371-372; 
extinction of, at Rio de Janeiro, 
384 ; general freedom from, 589. 

Yunca Indians, 457. 

Yungas, region called the, 177. 

Yupanqui, Francisco Tito, 129. 

Yura, village of, Peru, 81. 



Zambos, half-breeds of Indians and 
negroes, 66 ; estimated total num- 
ber of, 564. 



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